Your Grandma Needs To Be Smoking Pot
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It's going to be pretty hard to keep weed illegal when your grandparents are smoking it to prevent Alzheimer's.
This week scientists found evidence that the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), may be able to remove the buildup of a toxic protein linked to Alzheimer’s. It’s good news for the fastest growing group of marijuana users—seniors—and gives those above the age of 50 who haven’t come out of the pot closet a good reason to do so.
The study, published in the June edition of the Aging and Mechanisms of Diseasejournal, was performed by experts at the Salk Institute. Professor David Schubert, the lead researcher on the project, has long been searching for a way to treat the incurable disease. To perform the experiment, Schubert and his team grew neurons in a lab and manipulated them into producing large amounts of beta amyloid—a hallmark symptom of Alzheimer’s.
Normal brains metabolize the protein, using an enzyme to “wash it” from the brain. Those with Alzheimer’s, for reasons that are still unclear, do not. Left untouched, the stringy “garbage” protein clumps together and forms plaques in the brain, which interfere with cognition. When the scientist introduced THC into the nerve cells, these plaques disappeared—as did the inflammation that they were causing.
The THC reportedly worked by activating “receptors” in the brain which are used for intercellular signaling, communicating to cells that the protein should be broken down.
Antonio Currais, a Salk researcher in Schubert’s lab and one of the authors on the paper, highlighted the importance of the discovery. "Inflammation within the brain is a major component of the damage associated with Alzheimer's disease, but it has always been assumed that this response was coming from immune-like cells in the brain, not the nerve cells themselves," said Currais. "When we were able to identify the molecular basis of the inflammatory response to amyloid beta, it became clear that THC-like compounds that the nerve cells make themselves may be involved in protecting the cells from dying."