Cocaine makes brain eat itself
Lab tests with mice prove that cocaine makes the brain eat itself. Sounds like a plot for a horror movie, right there. Luckily, researchers from the John Hopkins University offer a scientific explanation.
Autophagy is the brain’s process of cleaning itself by eating away unwanted debris. Cocaine triggers uncontrolled autophagy that eats away even important brain matter.
“A cell is like a household that is constantly generating trash,” says Prasun Guha, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins and lead author of the paper. “Autophagy is the housekeeper that takes out the trash — it’s usually a good thing. But cocaine makes the housekeeper throw away really important things, like mitochondria, which produce energy for the cell.”
Researchers found a compound called CGP3466B that rescues the brain from the deadly effects of cocaine. The compound protects nerve cells from damage, but isn’t linked to stopping autophagy.
“Since cocaine works exclusively to modulate autophagy versus other cell death programs, there’s a better chance that we can develop new targeted therapeutics to suppress its toxicity,” says Maged M. Harraz, Ph.D., a research associate at Johns Hopkins and lead co-author of the paper
Snyder says more work needs to be done to test the compound in humans and learn more about cocaine-induced autophagy.
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