Human Anatomy and Physiology Question, How Do You Answer This?

Question by First: human anatomy and physiology question, how do you answer this?
please help i don’t know how to answer this.

explain which chemical substance, it’s location, and whether it has an inhibitory or excitatory effect for the following: 1. Why do people feel “high” from cocaine? 2. Michael J. Fox suffers from a disease that affects voluntary control of muscles. What causes Parkinson’s disease? 3. What blocks the transmission of Substance P? 4. A murder decides to kill his victim using strychnine. How does this physiological result in death? 5. Janine is suffering from delusions. Which neurotransmitter is involved?

Best answer:

Answer by Lukas Xavier
I’ll show with the first example and you’ll see how it’s done.

1) Open your browser
2) search for “cocaine” on google. First hit is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine
3) Check page for information, such as:
“Cocaine binds tightly at the dopamine transporter forming a complex that blocks the transporter’s function. The dopamine transporter can no longer perform its reuptake function, and thus dopamine accumulates in the synaptic cleft”
4) Possibly do follow-up research by going to the dopamine page, to learn more about this, since it seems important for understanding the effects of cocaine. You’d then find things like:
“Once in the synapse, dopamine binds to and activates postsynaptic dopamine receptors, resulting in the signal of the presynaptic cell being propagated to the postsynaptic neuron”

Collect all the information and write a simple summation of it. E.g.

Cocaine is a complex chemical which affects neurons by inhibiting the reuptake of certain neurotransmitters, including dopamine. This will have an excitatory effect on the post-synaptic neuron, since it effectively makes more of the transmitter available for signalling. Dopamine receptors are abundant in the reward system of the brain, which leads to the addictive effects of cocaine.

Depending on the requirements of your teacher you can add more information, pictures, formulas and references.

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