Currently, opioids are the standard treatment for chronic pain. Patients on opioids for long periods of time become desensitized to these drugs or become paradoxically hypersensitive to pain (hyperalgesia); however, the adaptive mechanisms are not well understood. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Yuan-Xiang Tao and colleagues from the New Jersey Medical School at Rutgers University report that the protein mTOR, which is a global regulator of translation, plays a major role in morphine tolerance.
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