United States: A new study found that young adults who are at risk of psychosis have problems with how their brain connects. This issue gets worse when they use cannabis. The study’s findings could help doctors create better treatments for psychosis that work on symptoms that current medicines don’t fix. 

As reported by the Medicalxpress, in the first time ever a group of researchers from McGill University found reduced synaptic density, the connection that allow neurons to communicate, in those at risk of psychosis as compared to a healthy control group. 

These findings are published in the JAMA Psychiatry Journal. 

While not all cannabis users will suffer psychosis, the potential for psychosis in some users is shown to be high. Our research can shed light on why,” said Dr. Romina Mizrahi, The senior author of the study and a professor in McGill’s Department of Psychiatry. ‘By all indications, cannabis negatively interferes with the neural pruning process in the brain, which is supposed to occur during the course of development.’ 

Hope for new treatments. 

This was achieved by the team employing a sophisticated method that involved employing brain scans on 49 people aged 16 to 30, who have had the recent psychotic symptoms and others with high risk for psychosis. The findings suggest that increased synaptic density is related to social withdrawal and lack of motivation, what the authors of the article describe as signs that are hard to address. 

“Today’s medications mostly focus on hallucinations, but they do not account for symptoms that interfere with the ability to handle interpersonal relationships, work or school,” said first author of the study Belen Blasco, a Ph.D. student at McGill University’s Integrated Program in Neuroscience. The key reward is that we might obtain some kind of therapeutic approach that helps to increase synaptic density and results in better social experience and quality of life of affected individuals. 

contrary to other research where camp high-risk groups have been followed for several years, this is the first-time researchers have really followed structural changes in a group high risk in terms of psychosis, which is a passer of schizophrenia. 

The team’s next research step will investigate whether such changes can signal the development of psychosis, and if not prevented, might occur soon. 

The research was performed in the frameworks of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital of McGill University.