U of L gets $1.8-million to research Alzheimer’s treatments, including using cannabis

“There’s preliminary work in the field that’s emerged just recently, particularly in animal models, suggesting that cannabis compounds can reverse brain pathology and cognitive impairments,” says McDonald. “We’re really interested in trying to prevent that descent into neurodegeneration and dementia because once the brain has changed, it’s very hard to bring it back. If we can prevent or prolong that descent into dementia, that’s really the goal.”

He believes new solutions will be needed for Alzheimer’s as the baby boomer generation gets closer to the age where the disease becomes more prevalent.

It currently affects around 500,000 people in Canada, but a decade from now, they could increase to nearly 940,000.

McDonald says cannabis compounds appear to target several pathologies found in the disease and that the compounds are “available, inexpensive, and relatively safe for human consumption.”

“We’re just at the tip of the iceberg of understanding the cannabinoids, how complex they are, and what effects they may have on the brain and the body.”

While the compounds are showing promise, he is urging against people starting to use cannabis specifically for this purpose. A lot of work still needs to be done to determine the correct combination of compounds, the doses required, the length of treatments, and who these treatments might be appropriate for.

At the same time this experiment is going on, another will look into how to track and stop abnormal proteins from spreading damage in the brain.

Dr. Robert Sutherland and his team at CCBN will team up with researchers at the University of Alberta to inject mice with abnormal proteins and observing how they spread through the brain.

“We’re mainly looking at the cortex since that’s where lots of memory and cognitive activity takes place,” says Sutherland. “We can measure how the brain activity changes as these abnormal proteins creep into circuits in the cortex. We’ll periodically assess the animal’s memory ability to see the moment when memory breaks down in these animals and what’s exactly happening in the cortex when that breakdown occurs.”

Once they have a better understanding of how spread occurs and how this impacts brain function, they plan to test different ways to block the spread.

One of these is to modify microglial cells, which are essentially the “front-line defense” when things go wrong in your body. Sometimes, when these cells get overwhelmed, they spit the bad proteins in different directions instead of trying to destroy them.

Sutherland wants to know if these cells may be contributing to the spread of bad proteins, and if so, whether reducing their activity might prevent spreading.

by David Opinko

U of L gets $1.8-million to research Alzheimer’s treatments, including using cannabis

What's Happening