The levels of cocaine residue in flowing water in Italy suggest that many more people take the drug than official national estimates previously suggested. A study published today in the open access journal Environmental Health reports on a new tool used to measure the levels of a cocaine by-product excreted in urine, and present in rivers and in flowing sewage water. This new method provides evidence that about 40,000 doses of cocaine are consumed every day in the Po valley - according to official estimates for this area, only 15,000 users admit to taking the drug at least once a month. Current official estimates for illegal drug use, including cocaine, are based on population surveys, medical records and crime statistics. These methods are known to be unreliable and to under-estimate the extent of illegal drug use, mainly because they rely on users self-reporting drug use, a socially censured behaviour, which users tend to be elusive about. Ettore Zuccato, from the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, Italy, and colleagues tested a new tool to measure a cocaine residue called benzoylecgonine (BE), present in flowing river and sewage waters because it is excreted in the urine of cocaine users. The residue is a by-product of metabolism in the human body, and cannot be produced by other means. The researchers measured the levels of BE in the river Po and in the sewage water of medium-sized Italian cities. Their results show that the Po, the largest Italian river, with five million people living in its vicinity, steadily carried the equivalent of about 4 kg of cocaine per day. This would imply an average daily use of at least 27 doses of 100 mg of cocaine for every 1,000 young adults of 15 to 34 years of age – the main consumers of cocaine.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 7734 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have developed a more effective way to rid surgical instruments of the infectious agents that cause CJD in humans. The twisted prion proteins are remarkably difficult to remove by standard decontamination processes. The new technique can remove prions to levels a thousand times lower than those achieved by existing methods. Details of the University of Edinburgh work are published in the Journal of General Virology. The prion responsible for vCJD is widely distributed in the tissues of the body's lymphatic and central nervous systems. The pre-symptomatic gestation period for CJD can be from a few years to decades. This has raised concerns that surgical instruments used on lymphoid tissues - such as the spleen and tonsils - could harbour the prion, and pass it on to patients on which they are subsequently used. Other forms of CJD have occasionally been transmitted by contaminated neurosurgical instruments. Studies have shown that the standards of surgical instrument cleaning and sterilisation in British hospitals vary considerably. Although the Department of Health has drawn up decontamination procedures for instruments that may have been exposed to the CJD prion, it is recognised that the guidelines are unlikely to remove all traces of infectivity. (C)BBC

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 7733 - Posted: 08.03.2005

Recent suicide attempters treated with cognitive therapy were 50 percent less likely to try to kill themselves again within 18 months than those who did not receive the therapy, report researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A targeted form of cognitive therapy designed to prevent suicide proved better at lifting depression and feelings of hopelessness than the usual care available in the community, according to Gregory Brown, Ph.D., Aaron Beck, M.D., University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues, who published their findings in the August 3, 2005 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). “Since even one previous attempt multiplies suicide risk by 38-40 times and suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for adults under 65, a proven way to prevent repeat attempts has important public health implications,” said NIMH Director Thomas Insel, M.D. To achieve a large enough sample to reliably detect differences in the effectiveness of interventions, the researchers first screened hundreds of potential suicide attempters admitted to the emergency room of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, ultimately recruiting 120 patients into the study. Averaging in their mid-thirties, 61 percent of the participants were female, 60 percent black, 35 percent white, and 5 percent Hispanic and other ethnicities. Most had attempted to kill themselves by drug overdosing (58 percent), with 17 percent by stabbing, 7 percent by jumping and 4 percent by hanging, shooting or drowning. Seventy-seven percent had major depression and 68 percent a substance use disorder.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 7732 - Posted: 06.24.2010

More than two decades after they fled the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, most Cambodian refugees who resettled in the United States remain traumatized, a study funded by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has found. Sixty-two percent suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and 51 percent from depression in the past year — six-to-seventeen times the national average for adults. The more trauma they endured, the worse their symptoms. In the August 3, 2005 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the RAND Corporation’s Grant Marshall, Ph.D., and colleagues report on their survey in the nation’s largest Cambodian community. An estimated three million of Cambodia’s seven million people died during the repression and civil wars of the l970s and most of those who survived suffered multiple traumas. Moreover, even after two decades in the U.S., the majority of the refugee community speak little or no English, are at income levels below poverty, and rely on public assistance. Since previous studies of such refugee populations have been criticized for possibly overestimating rates of mental disorders, Marshall and colleagues set out to allay such concerns by employing a more conservative approach. Native Khmer speakers conducted highly structured two-hour interviews with 490 randomly-selected former refugees, ages 35-75, in their Long Beach, CA homes, beginning in 2003. They used standardized questionnaires for gauging levels of violence exposure and alcohol use disorder and standardized diagnostic interviews to determine the prevalence of PTSD and depression.

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 7731 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Durham, N.C. – Using a novel analysis of the interactions among related genes, Duke University Medical Center researchers have uncovered some of the first evidence that complex genetic interactions account for autism risk. The Duke team found that the brain mechanism that normally stops or slows nerve impulses contributes to the disease. The team's findings implicate the so-called GABA receptor genes, which are genes that code for key components of "off switches" in the brain's neurons. GABA, or gamma aminobutyric acid, is a neurotransmitter – a chemical that one neuron fires at receptors on another neuron to trigger a response – in this case an inhibitory response. GABA receptors are protein switches nestled in nerve cell membranes that are triggered by GABA to cause such inhibition. Importantly, the study found that the GABA brain system most likely exerts its influence via complex gene-gene interactions. The current findings, and others that might result from the team's new approach, may ultimately point to methods for early diagnosis of autism, and perhaps new autism therapies, according to the researchers. "Identifying the genes that contribute to cause autism has been challenging," said Margaret Pericak-Vance, Ph.D., director of the Duke Center for Human Genetics. "One explanation is that many genes are involved, none of which individually may have a major effect." At least ten genes – and possibly as many as a 100 – are hypothesized to be involved in autism, she said. © 2001-2005 Duke University Medical Center

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 7730 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Babies born during famine have more than double the risk of developing schizophrenia later in life, according to a study based on the 1959-1961 famine in China. The findings show that starvation experienced during the critical stages of early gestation alters brain development, producing mental health consequences years later in adulthood, the researchers say. Schizophrenia occurs worldwide in about 1% of the population. But in individuals who received inadequate fetal nutrition, the risk may be as much as 2.3%, say researchers. David St Clair at Aberdeen University and colleagues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, looked at the incidence of schizophrenia among those born before, during and after the 1959-1961 period of extreme famine in the badly affected Chinese province of Anhui. Although birth rates during the period plummeted by 80%, the death-adjusted risk of schizophrenia for those born in 1960 was 2.3 times higher than for those born before or two years after the famine. The findings are consistent with those of a small Dutch study, which found a two-fold increase in schizophrenia for those born during a war-imposed famine in Holland during 1944 to1945, called the Hunger Winter. But since this study featured just 20-25 cases of the condition, those findings were only of modest statistical significance. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 7729 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Dr. Anna Berti sits facing a patient whose paralyzed left arm rests in her lap next to her good right arm. "Can you raise your left arm?" Dr. Berti asks. "Yes," the patient says. The arm remains motionless. Dr. Berti tries again. "Are you raising your left arm?" she asks. "Yes," the patient says. But the arm still does not move. Dr. Berti, a neuroscientist at University of Turin in Italy, has had many such conversations with stroke patients who suffer from denial syndrome, a strange disorder in which paralyzed patients vehemently insist that they are not paralyzed. This denial, Dr. Berti said, was long thought to be purely a psychological problem. "It was a reaction to a stroke: I am paralyzed, it is so horrible, I will deny it," she said. But in a new study, Dr. Berti and her colleagues have shown that denial is not a problem of the mind. Rather, it is a neurological condition that occurs when specific brain regions are knocked out by a stroke. Patients deny the paralysis because a closely related region of the brain that is still intact appears to tell them that their bodies are responding normally. The study, published in the July 15 issue of Science, may also shed new light on the nature of consciousness. Self-awareness, the researchers say, is not located in a unique brain structure or mechanism, but instead is distributed in many parts of the brain. As a result, there are different kinds of awareness for functions like movement, vision, awareness of the body and the space around the body. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 7728 - Posted: 08.02.2005

Psychology researchers Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine and Daniel Bernstein of the University of Washington found that if they could convince volunteers that, as a child, a certain food had made them sick, about 30 percent of the volunteers were likely to indicate they'd avoid that food in the future. Loftus says, "It looks like we can sometimes make people, using this suggestive manipulation, avoid certain foods or embrace other foods that might be healthy for them." Loftus has studied false memories for 25 years. She says she and other researchers have long known they could, "change memory for a detail of an event." For example, she notes how someone remembering a car accident where a car goes through a stop sign could be convinced to remember details differently. She said, "We would, through a suggestive and leading question, make people believe it was a yield and not a stop sign." She and other researchers are now working on planting entire false events in people's memories, what she calls, "rich false memories." Loftus says early research into rich false memories included events like where, "we made people believe that they were lost in a shopping mall for an extended time." She adds other researchers tried to convince people, "that they had an accident at a family wedding or that they were a victim of a vicious animal attack." Loftus says, "Because they're very complete, they're detailed and sometimes people are very confident about them." © ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Keyword: Obesity; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 7727 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Researchers have found that the two primary areas of the human brain appear to age in radically different ways: The cortex used in higher-level thought undergoes more extensive changes with age than the cerebellum, which regulates basic processes such as heartbeat, breathing and balance. Their work, based on an analysis of gene expression in various areas of human and chimpanzee brains, also shows that the two species' brains age very differently, despite their close evolutionary relationship. The research, by scientists at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, will be reported this week in the open-access journal PLoS Biology. "We were surprised both by the homogeneity of aging within the cortex and by the dramatic differences in aging between cortex and cerebellum," says Joshua B. Plotkin, a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. "The fact that gene activity levels in the cerebellum remain more stable as a person ages suggests that this region of the brain experiences less oxidative stress and damage as part of normal aging." "Much remains to be learned about how the brain ages and how changes in gene expression over time are related to brain activity," says Michael B. Eisen, assistant professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley. "Our analyses suggest that the different functions of different regions of the brain influence how they age, and that we can learn about functional variation and evolution by studying gene expression changes with age."

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 7726 - Posted: 08.02.2005

CHICAGO – Home videos of first and second year birthday parties provide support for parents' reports of children whose behavior seemed normal when they were one-year-olds but then display symptoms of autism at the age of two years, according to a study in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Although symptoms of autism have been observed in children as young as eight to 12 months, some parents report that their child had normal or near-normal development and then experienced a regression, as their communication and/or social skills worsened, according to background information in the article. Estimates of the prevalence of this "regressive pattern" vary widely and depend for the most part on parental memories that may be biased by later events, the authors suggest. Emily Werner, Ph.D., and Geraldine Dawson, Ph.D., of the University of Washington, Seattle, analyzed home videotapes of first and second year birthday parties for children without autism and for children who have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Of the 56 children included in the study, 15 were children diagnosed with ASD whose parents reported a worsening in social and/or communication skills during the second year of life, 21 were children with ASD whose parents reported that they had had impairments before age one year (early onset) and 20 were typically developing children. All the children in the study were younger than seven and all but three were younger than four years old.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 7725 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — The human brain processes male and female voices differently, according to a recent study that looked at how the human brain reacts to male and female voices. The research explains why most of us hear female voices more clearly, as well as that we form mental images of people based only on the sound of their voices. The findings, published in the current journal NeuroImage, also might give insight into why many men tire of hearing women speak: the "complexity" of female voices requires a lot of brain activity. "It is females' increased use of prosody, or the natural 'melody' of speech, that makes their voices more complex," said Michael Hunter, one of the study's authors. Hunter, professor of medicine and biomedical sciences at the University of Sheffield's Cognition and Neuroimaging Laboratory, explained to Discovery News that these qualities are not related to pitch, but rather to the vibration and number of sound waves. For the study, Hunter and his colleagues played recordings of male and female voices to 12 men while they underwent MRI brain imaging scans. Test subjects assigned a gender to the voices they heard while the scans took place. These identifications were 98-99 percent accurate. Researchers monitored the areas of the brain that showed activity during the scans. Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 7724 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jerusalem -- While "navigation" systems in automobiles are a fairly new (and still costly) innovation, monarch butterflies have managed for millennia to navigate their way for a distance of some 3000 miles (4800 kilometers) each fall from Canada to Mexico (and vice-versa in the spring) without losing their way. The phenomenon of long-range bird migration is a well-known one, but not in the insect world. Also, among birds their migration route is a round-trip one, which they make more than once in their lifetimes, while for the monarch it is strictly a one-way trip for each butterfly. How do these creatures do it? The mystery of the mechanisms involved in this remarkable phenomenon has been resolved by a team of scientists who did this by exploring the infinitesimal butterfly brain and eye tissues to uncover new insights into the biological machinery that directs this delicate creature on its lengthy flight path. The research team, led by Prof. Steven Reppert of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, included Dr. Oren Froy, now of the Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Others involved were from the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Irvine. Their latest findings were published in a recent issue of Neuron magazine, constituting a continuation of their earlier work, published in the journal Science.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Vision
Link ID: 7723 - Posted: 08.02.2005

Symptoms in mice that mimic Parkinson’s disease are reversed by treatment with amphetamines, including Ecstasy, according to a new study. The drugs seem to work through a pathway not involving the chemical dopamine, which surprised the researchers since dopamine deficiency is the cause of Parkinson’s. These results may lead to the discovery of “other systems that can replace or substitute for the very important action of dopamine”, says study author Marc Caron of Duke University, US. Dopamine transmission in a region of the brain called the striatum is essential for normal movement. Parkinson’s results when dopamine-producing neurons in this region die. The best current treatment for the condition is a chemical called L-Dopa – a natural precursor to dopamine. L-Dopa works well for patients in the early stages of the disease, but its effectiveness diminishes with time, and it can actually cause involuntary movements. To screen for other types of drugs, Russian scientists Tatyana Sotnikova and Raul Gainetdinov, working with the team at Duke University, studied mice altered to possess no brain dopamine. They show classic symptoms of Parkinson’s disease including muscle rigidity, problems initiating movement, and resting body tremor. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 7722 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brain may interpret the information it receives from sensory neurons using a code more complicated than scientists previously thought, according to new research from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. By studying how monkeys perceive a vibrating object when it touches the skin, scientists found that changes in an animal's attention over time influence how a sensory signal is interpreted. Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) international research scholar Ranulfo Romo of the Institute of Cellular Physiology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his colleagues—Rogelio Luna and Adrián Hernández, also of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Carlos D. Brody of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York—report their results in the September 2005 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, published online July 31, 2005. Neuroscientists already knew that touching the skin with a vibrating object causes specialized sensory neurons in the brain to fire, and that firing of these neurons, which are found in a region of the brain known as the primary somatosensory cortex, is directly related to monkeys' ability to tell how fast something is vibrating, Romo said. But the neurons' firing patterns are complex, and it's been tricky to tease out “which component of the neuronal activity was more likely associated with behavioral performance,” he explained. © 2005 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 7721 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Women who smoke in pregnancy may raise the risk of their child displaying anti-social behaviour, researchers say. There was a "small but significant" link between maternal smoking and both unruly behaviour and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, they said. The average symptom scores for both increased with the number of cigarettes the mother had smoked while pregnant, the study of 1,896 twins found. The Institute of Psychiatry work is in the British Journal of Psychiatry. The researchers said the findings did not mean unruly behaviour and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were linked, although ADHD is known to increase the risk of anti-social behaviour. Previous work has linked both ADHD and anti-social behaviour with maternal smoking. However, it was not clear whether the increased risk of anti-social behaviour was linked to the ADHD rather than maternal smoking per se. ADHD is a serious behavioural disorder which experts estimate may affect up to 6% of children. People with the condition have a poor attention span and tend to be impulsive and restless. ADHD is known to increase the likelihood of anti-social behaviour. But although ADHD is thought to have a strong medical element, social factors are often blamed for unruly behaviour. The new work suggests a biological cause for anti-social behaviour. A team at the Institute of Psychiatry, in London, sent questionnaires to the parents of 723 identical twins and 1,173 non-identical twins. (C)BBC

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 7720 - Posted: 08.01.2005

By POLLY MORRICE SOME time ago, while trolling the Web, I came across a 30-year-old paper by William P. Sullivan, originally published in The Bulletin of the West Virginia Association of College English Teachers, that describes Melville's Bartleby as ''a high-functioning autistic adult.'' The notion struck me as far-fetched, but it certainly has had legs. A recent search using the words ''Bartleby'' and ''autism'' turned up, among other results, a 2004 Modern Language Association essay on the pale scrivener's ''autistic presence'' and a University of Iowa study guide that asks if Melville might have ''observed some of these attributes in himself.'' Bartleby even appears on a site listing literary figures with autistic traits -- along with Pippi Longstocking, Sherlock Holmes and several characters from ''Pride and Prejudice.'' What's behind the impulse to unearth autism in the classics? In part, it may reflect our growing awareness of the disorder and its milder cousin, Asperger Syndrome. Critics seeking to diagnose literary icons may also be taking the current vogue for finding autism in dead geniuses -- Michelangelo, Wittgenstein -- to its logical conclusion. Given these trends, it's not surprising that the wave of fascination with neurological quirks has also touched contemporary literature. Over the past decade or so, novelists and short-story writers in various markets -- from genre authors to writers of young adult fiction to avant-garde experimentalists -- have all created characters who could be labeled autistic. It's easy to see autism's appeal to storytellers. Even mildly autistic people have problems communicating and understanding social behavior; what's more, these difficulties remain tantalizingly unexplained in an era when medical advances have demystified so many other ailments.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 7719 - Posted: 08.01.2005

Jerry Fodor On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for. Philosophers used to believe they had a proprietary method that reveals proprietary truths, but that is increasingly hard to credit. Nobody has been able to say what the method is, while the proprietary truths have been thin on the ground. There are, to be sure, a fair number of traditionally philosophical problems: scepticism, freedom of the will, the nature of the mental, the objectivity of the moral, the a priori, the modal, justification, induction and so on. But millennia of arguing these topics have now flowed under the bridge, and all the plausible positions seem already to be occupied; to say something new you have to say something outrageous. (I gather that much the same is true in Shakespeare criticism: Prospero was senile, Rosalind was queer, Goneril was a feminist – that sort of thing.) I’m happy to report, however, that books like David J. Buller’s Adapting Minds go some way towards dispelling the gloom. Philosophers are trained to criticize arguments. Very well, there are plenty of arguments out there aching to be criticized; let’s have a look at them. Buller, perfectly sensibly, has decided to keep busy by minding other people’s business and not worrying much about whether he is “really doing philosophy”. Good on him. Adapting Minds is an extended critical discussion of the Evolutionary Psychology movement. Evolutionary Psychology (when spelled with capitals) is the name of a galaxy of empirical theses including the idea that our minds are “massively modular” (they consist of a bundle of functionally autonomous, special-purpose, or “domain specific” information processors); that quite a lot of our psychological organization is innate (“Nativism”); and, crucially, that much of it is an adaptation to selection pressures that operated in the ancestral conditions in which our minds evolved. The affinities are with Sociobiology, of which Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is a more respectable descendant. Accordingly, Buller’s book comes in two parts. The first is an exposition and criticism of the various theses that compose EP; the second is a detailed examination of the data that have been offered in support of it.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 7718 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Brown University biologists have solved the structure of a critical piece of synapse-associated protein 97 (SAP97) found in abundance in the heart and head, where it is believed to play a role in everything from cardiac contractions to memory creation. Results are published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry. Dale Mierke, associate professor of medical science at Brown, said that knowing how a piece of SAP97 is built is an important step. Now that part of the protein’s structure is solved, scientists can create a molecule to disable it. That, in turn, will allow them to fully understand SAP97’s role in the body. And that will point drug makers to targets for developing new ways to treat cardiac or neurological diseases. “To arrive at a solution, you need to understand the problem,” Mierke said. “Solving protein structures opens doors for effective treatments.” SAP97 is found mainly in the central nervous system and is known as a “scaffolding” protein. In this role, it serves as a sort of tether, grabbing proteins inside the cell critical to nerve signaling and keeping them close to N-methyl-D-asparate (NMDA) receptors at the cell surface. NMDA receptors help usher in a neurotransmitter called glutamate that is essential for learning and memory and also plays a role in drug addiction. A similar scaffolding mechanism is at work in the heart, where it affects basic functions, including the heartbeat.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 7717 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., AUG. 1 -- There is strong evidence that babies born at night have a greater risk of dying in their first month of life than babies born earlier in the day, according to a new study published this month in Obstetrics & Gynecology. "We're not surprised at this finding because it is supported by previous studies in the medical literature that were carried out in Europe," said Diane M. Ashton, M.D., M.P.H., associate medical director of the March of Dimes. "More research needs to be done to identify the causal factors that underlie this greater risk. This would be an important next step in developing effective strategies to prevent these excess neonatal deaths from occurring. If even one or two of the key elements could be identified, that could make a big difference in saving babies' lives." "Time of Birth and the Risk of Neonatal Death," by Jeffrey B. Gould, M.D., M..P.H., of the Division of Neonatal and Developmental Medicine, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, and colleagues, appears in the August issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 7716 - Posted: 08.01.2005

Cannabis-based drugs could offer treatment hope to sufferers of inflammatory bowel disease, UK researchers report. Cannabis smokers with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have often claimed that smoking a joint seems to lessen their symptoms. So a group of researchers from Bath University and Bristol University, both in the UK, decided to explore the clinical basis for the claims. “There is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that using cannabis seems to reduce the pain and frequency of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, so we decided to see if we could find out what was going on there,” says Karen Wright, a pharmacologist at Bath University. “Historically, it was smoked in India and China centuries ago for its gastrointestinal properties.” The chronic conditions, known collectively as IBD, are caused by an over-active immune system which produces severe inflammation in areas of the gastrointestinal tract. Up to 180,000 people in the UK are thought to have colitis or Crohn’s disease and suffer symptoms of pain, urgent diarrhoea, severe tiredness and loss of weight. Repeated attacks can lead to scarring of the colon and fibrosis to the extent that the bowel narrows to form a stricture, for which a colonectomy – the surgical removal of the bowel – is the only cure. Reports that cannabis eased IBD symptoms indicated the possible existence of cannabinoid receptors in the intestinal lining, which respond to molecules in the plant-derived chemicals. Wright and colleagues grew sections of human colon and examined them in vitro. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 7715 - Posted: 06.24.2010