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Caffeine and Cannabis Effects on Vital Neurotransmitters in Rats

57 points| caublestone | 8 years ago |ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

70 comments

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[+] Mo3|8 years ago|reply
Nothing has ever done me more good than this combination. My biggest success in work at my current company, a big API-first platform for insurance comparison was built from scratch in 2 weeks time, spent locked inside my apartment, coffee machine running 24/7, a 100mg cookie in the morning and a joint every 2 hours. No one knows.
[+] meuk|8 years ago|reply
I am convinced that cannabis improves concentration and eliminates feelings of boredom. I always was average at best at football. I smoked cannabis before a match once. It was by far the best match I ever played and I scored thrice.

Of course, this is anecdotal evidence and could be a coincidence, but I am firmly convinced of the effect.

[+] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
I hope we start studying this more. I was never a regular user, but I tried it a few times and spent a lot of time in smoky rooms.

One of the reasons I didn’t use it was that it really impacted my ability to do things like mental arthmetric. I worked in sales in school and I remember being freaked out as it felt like a part of my brain was powered down.

I can normally do most addition/multiplication/approximate averages faster than I can type. The time I ran into this I couldn’t spit out an answer for sales tax or add a few numbers together! :)

I’m curious as to why the effect on me was so different than what you experience!

[+] linkmotif|8 years ago|reply
It’s a great combination. Kind of easy to get out of hand but also not the worst to scale back, at least for me.
[+] frankhorrigan|8 years ago|reply
For anyone looking to recreate this apparently successful combination: 100mg of THC is enough to reduce most people to a state of fearful catatonia or induce an acute nervous breakdown. Combine that with loads of caffeine and you'll likely feel very bad for a very long time.
[+] rowyourboat|8 years ago|reply
I am a total layman, so could somebody explain the significance of this study? Obviously those substances alter the brain chemistry, that is not surprising, I think. How are those changes significant? Is there cause for concern?
[+] erokar|8 years ago|reply
> Is there cause for concern?

There is really nothing surprising about the findings. Also note that the animals' brain tissues were analyzed 24 hours after last administration, so it says little to nothing about permanent effects (which have never been found in other studies, afaik). I really don't get why trivial/unsurprising findings like this raise so high on HN.

[+] snarfy|8 years ago|reply
Caffeine and cannabis work together.

> However, the combination of cannabis and caffeine mostly caused synergetic response in the level of the neurotransmitters; this implies that both substances produced their individual effects and did not cancel out the effects of one another. This is also expected since they bind primarily to various receptors. Thus, the resultant relative hyper increase is the cumulative effect of their individual influences.

[+] lamename|8 years ago|reply
No. After a quick look, 1) the main point seems to be toward juveniles 2) this isn't a particularly in-depth study. As you said, substances alter chemistry, no surprise.

To be clear, there's evidence elsewhere that caffeine and cannabis can have a negative impact on the developing brain, but the data here don't really go in depth on that.

[+] DanBC|8 years ago|reply
Caffiene affects the brain.

Cannabis affects the brain.

Using both together affects the brain more than we'd expect.

Probably don't let children[1] use cannabis or caffiene, but certainly protect them from heavy long term use of either.

[1] child is hard to define, but maybe anyone under 21.

[+] tyu100|8 years ago|reply
There is none. Rat/mice studies are used as very early steps to point directions for actually significant studies in human populations.
[+] rambossa|8 years ago|reply
same here... good? bad? surprisingly good? etc.?
[+] pweissbrod|8 years ago|reply
> Is there cause for concern?

Accidentally smoking your coffee and brewing your cannabis will make for a rough day I imagine

[+] tyu100|8 years ago|reply
Please stop posting these pre-clinical studies on rats and mice! No one should ever be taking anything away from these sorts of studies for human health.
[+] viperscape|8 years ago|reply
The article mentions "cannabis abuse" a few times, what metric is there to put use into the abuse column?
[+] drjesusphd|8 years ago|reply
Using when illegal seems to be the common definition.
[+] DanBC|8 years ago|reply
Use turns into abuse when the person is aware of harmful effects but continues to use. Or when the person wishes to discontinue use but is unable to.

Some definitions include very high rates of use.

[+] dimovich|8 years ago|reply
Coffee, weed and plenty of water.
[+] zeckalpha|8 years ago|reply
> 100 mg/kg

I don’t know about mice, but for a human, that would be a lot of caffeine.

[+] scottmf|8 years ago|reply
It probably isn’t for mice. They always have a much higher mg/kg value.

100mg/kg is ~4–5mg for a mouse.

[+] dnate|8 years ago|reply
yes, that's about half the LD50 for humans. Definitely more than you would consume as a non-addict on a regular day.
[+] nonbel|8 years ago|reply
What is a vital vs non-vital neurotransmitter? They don't define this in the paper so that term seems totally superfluous.
[+] dekhn|8 years ago|reply
This paper is useless garbage in terms of telling us anything about humans who consume either or both of these drugs.
[+] scottmf|8 years ago|reply
Anyone else in the UK unable to access ncbi.nlm.nih.gov? I couldn’t access it yesterday either.
[+] wjh_|8 years ago|reply
My subnet is blocked, but I'm going through my VPS...

Apparently the subnet I'm on has been blocked for bulk downloading.

[+] leemailll|8 years ago|reply
If both can't significantly change neurotransmitters, that would be a splash
[+] __x0x__|8 years ago|reply
Looks like a crap article in a crap journal. In the abstract they refer to cannabis as a stimulant, which seems quite incorrect. Also the results are unsurprising and not very exciting.
[+] DanBC|8 years ago|reply
The word "stimulant" refers to this:

> The levels of G-6-PDH were increased in the brain tissues of all the treated animals (Fig. ​(Fig.5).5). Caffeine produced quite more significant effects relative to cannabis and the combination of both increased the level of G-6-PDH greatly.

[+] cptn_brittish|8 years ago|reply
Cannabis seems to bridge the gap between all major drug types with it simultaneously acting as a stimulate, depressant and psychedelic with the depressant being the most obvious to a user.