Pot-Like Compound May Slow Alzheimer's

Tests On Rats Show Less Brain Inflammation, Better Memory With Synthetic Cannabinoid

(WebMD)  A marijuana-like compound may cut brain inflammation and slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease, scientists report. The compound is a synthetic cannabinoid, made in a lab to resemble marijuana.

Old rats given the compound performed better in a maze, according to research by Gary Wenk, Ph.D., professor of psychology and neuroscience at Ohio State University, and others.

What about people? "Now, I don't know, because I'm just a rat guy, whether this is going to work that well in humans," Wenk tells WebMD. "But it looks like it will, because of what we've seen with other drugs in other diseases."

The marijuana-like drug "won't cure the disease, but what it might do is stop the processes that are involved in making the disease worsen," Wenk says.

"I think that's the most exciting aspect. What may matter is that we can tell people that we might be able to step in, stop the inflammation, and they might die of old age before the inflammation has a chance to rebuild itself, which we believe takes many decades," Wenk says. "That's the main hope, I think."

Wenk's team tested the synthetic cannabinoid to curb brain inflammation in rats. "We know that brain inflammation at a low level plays a role in lots of diseases" including Alzheimer's, Wenk explains. "Now inflammation in all these conditions doesn't cause the disorder," he says.

But, "it has consequences. In fact, the inflammation appears long before plaques and tangles and memory impairment," Wenk says, referring to the plaques and tangles seen in the brains of people who die with Alzheimer's disease.

For their study, researchers looked at young and old male rats.

Some of the rats got the cannabinoid drug; others got a drug-free placebo. The rats received the drug or placebo through shots or a pump hooked up to their bodies.

Results showed less brain inflammation with the drug than with the placebo.
Plus, older rats taking the drug outperformed their placebo peers on a memory test involving a watery maze.

"Now, we didn't make them as smart as young rats. Nothing does that yet," Wenk says. "But we lessened the impairment by half."

"We've tested the animals' memory ability in a task that's vulnerable to aging, and then given them a drug to see if it could reduce their inflammation," Wenk says. "And we cut it down by 50% to 90%, depending on what part of the brain you look at."

"I'm not recommending that [people] go out and smoke marijuana," Wenk says.
"We have to produce this anti-inflammatory effect at a dose that doesn't make our rats high or impaired. This is a psychoactive compound and it is regulated for that reason."

"I don't know what it means to be high if you're a rat, but I do know if you are high, you probably are memory-impaired; your attention is impaired," Wenk says.


"Anti-inflammatories in plants and antioxidants are a dime a dozen," Wenk says. "They're just everywhere. The important thing, though, is that they not have too many side effects and that they actually get in the brain.

"So that's what makes a ... drug like a cannabinoid so useful," he explains.

"It [this compound] does something that no other anti-inflammatory that I've tested in our model has ever done, and that's that it reduces inflammation in an old brain," Wenk says. "Old brains are different than young brains."

The drug hasn't been tested against Alzheimer's in people. But if the research pans out, people might one day take such drugs to head off Alzheimer's decades later, Wenk notes.

"The problem is, who would take it?" he says. "We don't have reliable early tests [for Alzheimer's] — not yet. So do we have to treat everyone? Well, that ends up being very expensive. We don't have an answer to that question yet."

Much more work lies ahead, but Wenk sounds hopeful.

"This is something that might actually happen in my lifetime, before I get to the point where I have to worry about it," Wenk says. "So from that standpoint, I think it's very positive."

SOURCES: Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting, Neuroscience 2006, Atlanta, Oct. 14-18, 2006. Gary Wenk, Ph.D., professor, departments of psychology and neuroscience & molecular virology, immunology, and medical genetics, Ohio State University.

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Top 10 Reports the Government Wish It Hadn%u2019t Funded

10) MARIJUANA USE HAS NO EFFECT ON MORTALITY: A massive study of California HMO members funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) found marijuana use caused no significant increase in mortality. Tobacco use was associated with increased risk of death. (Sidney, S et al. Marijuana Use and Mortality. American Journal of Public Health. Vol. 87 No. 4, April 1997. p. 585-590. Sept. 2002.)

9) HEAVY MARIJUANA USE AS A YOUNG ADULT WONT RUIN YOUR LIFE: Veterans Affairs scientists looked at whether heavy marijuana use as a young adult caused long-term problems later, studying identical twins in which one twin had been a heavy marijuana user for a year or longer but had stopped at least one month before the study, while the second twin had used marijuana no more than five times ever. Marijuana use had no significant impact on physical or mental health care utilization, health-related quality of life, or current socio-demographic characteristics. (Eisen SE et al. Does Marijuana Use Have Residual Adverse Effects on Self-Reported Health Measures, Socio-Demographics or Quality of Life? A Monozygotic Co-Twin Control Study in Men. Addiction. Vol. 97 No. 9. p.1083-1086. Sept. 1997)

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8) THE GATEWAY EFFECT MAY BE A MIRAGE: Marijuana is often called a gateway drug by supporters of prohibition, who point to statistical associations indicating that persons who use marijuana are more likely to eventually try hard drugs than those who never use marijuana, implying that marijuana use somehow causes hard drug use. But a model developed by RAND Corp. researcher Andrew Morral demonstrates that these associations can be explained without requiring a gateway effect. More likely, this federally funded study suggests, some people simply have an underlying propensity to try drugs, and start with what%u2019s most readily available. (Morral AR, McCaffrey D and Paddock S. Reassessing the Marijuana Gateway Effect. Addiction. December 2002. p. 1493-1504.)

7) PROHIBITION DOESNT WORK (PART I): The White House had the National Research Council examine the data being gathered about drug use and the effects of U.S. drug policies. NRC concluded the nation possesses little information about the effectiveness of current drug policy, especially of drug law enforcement. And what data exist show little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and prevalence or frequency of use. In other words, there is no proof that prohibition, the cornerstone of U.S. drug policy for a century, reduces drug use. (National Research Council. Informing Americas Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Dont Know Keeps Hurting Us. National Academy Press, 2001. p. 193.)

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6) PROHIBITION DOESNT WORK (PART II: DOES PROHIBITION CAUSE THE GATEWAY EFFECT?): U.S. and Dutch researchers, supported in part by NIDA, compared marijuana users in San Francisco, where non-medical use remains illegal, to Amsterdam, where adults may possess and purchase small amounts of marijuana from regulated businesses. Looking at such parameters as frequency and quantity of use and age at onset of use, they found no differences except one: Lifetime use of hard drugs was significantly lower in Amsterdam, with its tolerant marijuana policies. For example, lifetime crack cocaine use was 4.5 times higher in San Francisco than Amsterdam. (Reinarman, C, Cohen, PDA, and Kaal, HL. The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy: Cannabis in Amsterdam and San Francisco. American Journal of Public Health. Vol. 94, No. 5. May 2004. p. 836-842.)

5) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART I): Federal researchers implanted several types of cancer, including leukemia and lung cancers, in mice, then treated them with cannabinoids (unique, active components found in marijuana). THC and other cannabinoids shrank tumors and increased the lifespans of the mice. (Munson, AE et al. Antineoplastic Activity of Cannabinoids. Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Sept. 1975. p. 597-602.)

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4) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER, (PART II): In a 1994 study the government tried to suppress, federal researchers gave mice and rats massive doses of THC, looking for cancers or other signs of toxicity. The rodents given THC lived longer and had fewer cancers, in a dose-dependent manner (i.e. the more THC they got, the fewer tumors). (NTP Technical Report On The Toxicology And Carcinogenesis Studies Of 1-Trans- Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol, CAS No. 1972-08-3, In F344/N Rats And B6C3F Mice, Gavage Studies. See also, Medical Marijuana: Unpublished Federal Study Found THC-Treated Rats Lived Longer, Had Less Cancer, AIDS Treatment News no. 263, Jan. 17, 1997.)

3) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART III): Researchers at the Kaiser-Permanente HMO, funded by NIDA, followed 65,000 patients for nearly a decade, comparing cancer rates among non-smokers, tobacco smokers, and marijuana smokers. Tobacco smokers had massively higher rates of lung cancer and other cancers. Marijuana smokers who didnt also use tobacco had no increase in risk of tobacco-related cancers or of cancer risk overall. In fact their rates of lung and most other cancers were slightly lower than non-smokers, though the difference did not reach statistical significance. (Sidney, S. et al. Marijuana Use and Cancer Incidence (California, United States). Cancer Causes and Control. Vol. 8. Sept. 1997, p. 722-728.)

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2) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART IV): Donald Tashkin, a UCLA researcher whose work is funded by NIDA, did a case-control study comparing 1,200 patients with lung, head and neck cancers to a matched group with no cancer. Even the heaviest marijuana smokers had no increased risk of cancer, and had somewhat lower cancer risk than non-smokers (tobacco smokers had a 20-fold increased lung cancer risk). (Tashkin D. Marijuana Use and Lung Cancer: Results of a Case-Control Study. American Thoracic Society International Conference. May 23, 2006.)

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And the number one is:

1) MARIJUANA DOES HAVE MEDICAL VALUE: In response to passage of Californias medical marijuana law, the White House had the Institute of Medicine (IOM) review the data on marijuanas medical benefits and risks. The IOM concluded that nausea, appetite loss, pain and anxiety are all afflictions of wasting, and all can be mitigated by marijuana. While noting potential risks of smoking, the report acknowledged there is no clear alternative for people suffering from chronic conditions that might be relieved by smoking marijuana, such as pain or AIDS wasting. The government%u2019s refusal to acknowledge this finding caused co-author John A. Benson to tell the New York Times that %u201Cthe government loves to ignore our report; they would rather it never happened%u201D. (Joy, JE, Watson, SJ, and Benson, JA. Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. National Academy Press. 1999. p. 159. See also, Harris, G. FDA Dismisses Medical Benefit From Marijuana. New York Times. Apr. 21, 2006)

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There are a multitude of studies that exist that state not only is marijuana (and THC) not clearly harmful to human beings, it actually proves beneficial in a large variety of subjects and situations. In fact, no single danger of the compound THC has ever been proven in a scientific study, beyond the dangers from the actual process of smoking marijuana (and smoking anything is dangerous). Alcohol, by contrast, has been proven in thousands of studies to have highly deleterious effects on human beings, both physically and psychologically, and both short and long term.

Yet alcohol is legal and marijuana is not!

Marijuana's illegality is ridiculous. It became that way through racism (read some history) and pure, PURE ignorance, and it has been demonized by the media and the Federal government for so long that very few people actually know the truth about pot anymore. Villifying marijuana has become such a national institution I do not forsee any possibility of open dialogue or debate on it for at least two more decades.

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I should have said "health hazards" in my previous post, not "dangers" -- There are plenty of "dangers" regarding marijuana usage.

The danger of being arrested and put into jail for smoking a joint to relax in the comfort of your own home is one of them. The danger of running out of chips and cookies is another.