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Marijuana Ingredient May Slow Alzheimer's, Study Says
Cadaver and animal studies suggest that cannabinoids found in marijuana may reduce inflammation related to Alzheimer's disease and perhaps slow progression of the disease itself, the BBC reported Feb. 22.
Researchers from Complutense University and the Cajal Institute in Madrid looked at the brains of people who died from Alzheimer's and those of healthy people who died at about the same age, focusing on cannabinoid receptor sites and microglia, which activate the brain's immune response. The latter are known to accumulate near plaque deposits caused by Alzheimer's, causing inflammation.
The brains of Alzheimer's patients were found to have severely reduced cannabinoid-receptor functionality. Researchers then dosed rats with synthetic cannabinoids and a protein that forms Alzheimer's-like brain plaques. These rats had better mental functioning than those that did not receive the cannabinoid drugs; microglia apparently were not activated in the rats receiving the cannabinoids.
"These findings that cannabinoids work both to prevent inflammation and to protect the brain may set the stage for their use as a therapeutic approach for Alzheimer's disease," said researcher Maria de Ceballos.
Harriet Millward of the Alzheimer's Research Trust noted that the research goal should be to create drugs that act only on the CR2 cannabinoid receptor sites, not the CR1 sites, which produce most of the euphoric effects associated with marijuana. "If it is possible to make drugs that act only on CR2, as suggested by the authors of this study, they might mimic the positive effects of cannabinoids without the damaging ones of marijuana," said Millward. "However, this is a fairly new field of research and producing such selective drugs is not an easy task. There is also no evidence yet that cannabinoid-based drugs can slow the decline in human Alzheimer's patients."
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