fMRI reveals cannabis extract may help patients with psychosis
Patients with psychosis may benefit from therapeutic effects found to be derived from cannabidiol (CBD), a naturally occurring constituent of cannabis, according to research published Aug. 29 in JAMA Psychiatry.
Using fMRI, researchers determined that CBD’s therapeutic properties may come from its ability to normalize neural connections in certain regions of the brain in high-risk psychosis patients.
“Although there is good evidence that CBD can have beneficial effects on psychotic symptoms, how these effects are mediated in the brain remains unclear,” lead author Sagnik Bhattacharyya, MD, PhD, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at King’s College London. “The present study sought to address this issue by examining the effects of CBD in individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) of psychosis.”
Researchers analyzed brain fMRI of 33 participants at high risk of psychosis and 19 healthy controls between November 2016 and October 2017. In the 33 participants in the psychosis group, 16 received a single oral dose of 600 milligrams of CBD and 17 participants received a placebo. Controls were not given any drugs, according to the researchers.
Participants were then instructed to perform basic learning tasks, including verbal encoding and recall. The encoding process involved participants being shown word pairs four times each and then saying out loud whether each pair went well together.
“During recall, one of the words from previously presented pairs was shown, and participants were asked to say the word that it had previously been associated with,” the researchers wrote.
Although the researchers found no significant difference in performance between both groups, fMRI data showed that the CBD group had greater brain activation in the parahippocampal, striatal and midbrain regions than in the placebo group. Additionally, the placebo group presented lower brain activation than the control group.
“This study suggests that a single dose of CBD in an experimental setting may partially normalize dysfunction in the MTL, striatum, and midbrain in individuals at CHR of psychosis,” according to the researchers.
A recent graduate from Dominican University (IL) with a bachelor’s in journalism, Melissa joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering all aspects of health imaging. She’s a fan of singing and playing guitar, elephants, a good cup of tea, and her golden retriever Cooper.