Any student that has ever been in a health class knows that marijuana affects memory. Scientists have determined that the memory loss has less to do with the affect of the THC on the neurons than it does on the neuroglia. Those 'helper' cells have THC receptors and they are certainly affected.
AP Biology and anatomy students, this article is especially pertinent to you as we covered both the receptor molecules and cell signalling in AP Biology and neuroglia was a topic covered in anatomy.
Everybody knows that marijuana makes a person forgetful. Recently, researchers began to look at brain cells called astroglia, which have been ignored in past studies. THC, a chemical found in marijuana, affects the persons memory by connecting to the astroglia brain cells. THC is what most scientists focused on in past studies.
ReplyDeleteTo start off this new research, scientists gave a shot of synthetic THC into the hippocampuse of rats brains. Hippocampuse plays an important role in receiving and storing memories. It also plays a part in experiencing certain emotions such as anger or fear. Researchers then recorded the brain activity of the rats. They made connections between particular brain neurons and decided to experiment with three types of mutant mice. From this, they concluded that the THC acts directly on astroglia rather than the neurons which they had thought in past studies. It showed that glutamate, a neurotrasmitter in the brain, is used for communication between astroglia brain cells and neurons. This causes the neurons to become weak and make the the connections with astroglia not as strong.
The mice that were injected with THC had a difficult time going through mazes. However, the mouse with mutant astroglia could not respond to the THC and therefor had no troubles whatsover with going through the mazes. They concluded that when astroglia is "turned off", you turn off the tool for weakening neuronal synapses.
Astroglia, a type of glia, is a name given to any brain cells that are not neurons. They make up over half of the cells in your brain. Astroglia have many functions like support, regulating brain fluid, feeding neurons, and taking up or releasing glutamate.
Scientists discovered that looking at different "slices" of the brain are insufficient for studying how drugs affect a persons entire brain. THC is not the only chemical found in marijuana. Cannibidiol is also found in marijuana.
From this article, we can conclude that scientists are going to be experimenting more on the effects of THC. An idea that they did not answer in this article is if the amount of THC administrated will have different effects on the human body. Neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and glutamate, exert their effects by attaching to the receptor molecules in the cells. Receptor molecules have the duty of recieving information from outside the cell.
Miranda Cupples
Any illegal drug you take is going to effect you in a bad way, and mary jane is one of many that effect your memory. Scientists have began to study the astroglia cells in the brain, and they have found that the THC, found in marijuana, is the main cause of why these astroglia neurons become weak, which causes problems with memory. They did a study on mice where they injected some with THC, right where the hippocampus is. The hippocampus is where the very strong memory parts are in your brain, and this caused the mice that had been injected to become lost in the maze. The one with mutant astroglia couldn't respond to the TCH, which helped him make his way quickly through the maze. This helped the scientist find that they were looking at the wrong neurons all along. Now scientists are looking at different parts of the brain to help them efficiently study how drugs effect the brain, memory, etc.
ReplyDelete