Multiple sclerosis patients who regularly smoke pot to relieve pain and spastic muscles could be putting their brain function in peril, say researchers, who found that marijuana can further reduce cognitive abilities often already impaired by the disease.
In a study in this week’s issue of the journal Neurology, researchers found that MS patients who had engaged in long-term pot-smoking were twice as likely as non-weed users to have diminished cognitive abilities overall.
“Prolonged inhaled or ingested (street) cannabis use is shown to significantly worsen one’s attention span, speed of thinking and processing information, working memory, executive functions and visuospatial skills,” said lead investigator Dr. Anthony Feinstein, a neuropsychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.
“Given that about 40 to 60 per cent of MS patients have problems with cognitive function to begin with, any drug that may add to this burden is cause for concern.”
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Ray Miller didn’t let multiple sclerosis control his life. Instead, he fought back.
Diagnosed with the physically debilitating disease in 2003, the 32-year-old North Vancouver man has since completed five marathons, including the Ironman Canada competition — and he’s not about to stop. Miller is an avid runner, swimmer and biker who trains rigorously to keep the symptoms of his disease at bay, regularly sharing his progress on a personal blog, moresquirrel.blogspot.com.
“Most of the time, if you would ask me how I’m doing, I’m doing just fine,” he said.
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Tetsuro Fujita’s eureka moment about a Himalayan fungus came in 1985. As the scientist was driving over a bridge between Japan’s Shikoku and Honshu islands on his way to conduct research on traditional herbal remedies, Fujita was contemplating ways to keep patients’ immune systems from rejecting transplanted organs. He was particularly intrigued by the example of a parasitic fungus used in a Chinese medicinal soup. Known in Asia as “winter insect, summer plant,” the Cordyceps fungus invades an insect larva during winter, feeds on it for months, and then grows out of the host by summer. Fujita suddenly realized that the fungus must be suppressing the immune system of the insect larvae on which it grew to maturity.
His research on Cordyceps at Kyoto University eventually helped Japanese drugmaker Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma produce Gilenya, a treatment for multiple sclerosis that Novartis #NVS# licensed and began selling in the U.S. in October. UBS #UBS# says annual sales of the medicine, the first pill to treat the autoimmune disease afflicting more than 2 million people worldwide, may exceed $5 billion annually by 2018. That would rank it among the 10 best-selling drugs worldwide, based on data from researcher IMS Health. Mitsubishi Tanabe will likely book royalties equivalent to 10 percent of sales, based on the median of estimates by four analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News.
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