Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:


After you have finished reading this article you can click here to go back.

UK: Scans reveal brain damage from cannabis is like schizophrenia

Martyn Halle

The Sunday Times

Sunday 11 Dec 2005

---
SCIENTISTS have shown for the first time that the damage to brains from
smoking cannabis is the same as that in schizophrenia sufferers.

Images taken using a new scanning technique provide evidence that
cannabis disrupts the brain's electrical signals in the same way as in
schizophrenia.

The findings add to growing evidence the drug may be a significant cause
of mental illness in adolescents and a possible trigger for
schizophrenia in those who are genetically vulnerable.

Previous studies have examined patients' behaviour and medical
histories. This is the first time direct evidence of a link has been
found inside the brain.

"What we saw should cause alarm because the type of damage in cannabis
smokers' brains was exactly the same as in those with schizophrenia and
in exactly the same place in the brain," said Dr Manzar Ashtari,
associate professor of radiology at the Albert Einstein College of
Medicine in New York. Her research was presented last week to the
Radiological Society of North America in Chicago.

Ashtari added: "To me, this is proof of the damage cannabis can do and
it is shown up graphically for the first time. All the research by
psychiatrists so far has strongly suggested cannabis-smoking youngsters
run a higher risk of developing psychotic behaviour. Now we have
extremely strong evidence that shows what damage has been done."

The new research will add to pressure on the government to change its
policy on cannabis. Last year the drug was downgraded from class B to
class C, which means the police no longer routinely arrest people caught
with small amounts.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is shortly expected to tell
Charles Clarke, the home secretary, that evidence of the harm caused by
cannabis is not strong enough for this decision to be reconsidered.

Ashtari's team used a new technique called diffusion tensor imaging to
look into the brains of 15 cannabis smokers, who had all given up taking
the drug a month before the study.

They had smoked an average of once a day for a year and were aged 15 to
18. Their brains were compared with those of schizophrenics and of
healthy people.

The scans looked deep into the "white matter" - the material that
connects brain cells. In patients with schizophrenia, electrical signals
are no longer routed correctly.

Schizophrenia sufferers find they are unable to separate real from
unreal experiences and may see hallucinations, hear voices, lose the
ability to concentrate and become paranoid. Sufferers typically develop
the illness between the ages of 17 and 30.

In both the schizophrenia patients and the cannabis users, damage was
found to white matter in a bundle of nerves and other fibres in the left
frontal lobe. This area is associated with language and hearing.

This part of the brain is still developing during adolescence, which
means it is vulnerable to damage. "We were able to see in real time
abnormal behaviour in this area which was not present in the brains of
adolescents who did not have schizophrenia and had not smoked cannabis,"
said Ashtari.

Robin Murray, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London,
said: "This does seem to be a landmark study, although we will need to
see it repeated. For the first time, we are able to see the effects of
cannabis smoking on the brain."

 

 

 

After you have finished reading this article you can click here to go back. 




This page was created by the Cannabis Campaigners' Guide.

Feel free to link to this page!