Cocaine Brain? Cognitive Decline Tied To Chronic Use Of Illicit Drug

Although cocaine makes people feel more alert and on top of things in the moment, it can leave users vulnerable to a much slower brain in the long run. A new study shows that chronic use ages key parts of the brain at an accelerated rate. The findings were published online April 24 in Molecular Psychiatry.

Regular cocaine users often experience early cognitive decline and brain atrophy, and the new findings show how these users are, indeed, actually losing gray matter in their brain much faster than people who don’t take the drug.

“As we age we all lose gray matter,” Karen Ersche of the Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the new study, said in a prepared statement. But, she noted, “chronic cocaine users lose grey matter at a significantly faster rate, which could be a sign of premature aging.”

Ersche and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brains of 60 people ages 18 to 50 who used cocaine habitually and 60 healthy people of similar ages and IQs who did not. They found that on average, healthy individuals who didn’t use the drug lost about 1.7 milliliters of grey matter annually, whereas cocaine users were losing closer to 3.1 milliliters each year.

Cocaine users lost much more gray matter in the prefrontal and temporal regions—which help control memory, decision-making and attention—than non-users did.

The find brings a new insight into “why the cognitive deficits typically seen in old age have frequently been observed in middle aged chronic users of cocaine,” Ersche said. Even after the researchers excluded the 16 people from the cocaine group who also had alcohol problems, the trend of accelerated brain mass loss held up.

Of the estimated 21 million cocaine users worldwide, about 1.9 million lived in the U.S. as of 2008. And the largest segment of U.S. users were people ages 18 to 25—some 1.5 percent of whom said they had used cocaine in the past month, according to the National Institutes of Health.

“Young people taking cocaine today need to be educated about the long-term risk of aging prematurely,” Ersche said. But she and her colleagues also noted that the results also underscore the extra cognitive needs that middle-aged and older adult drug users seem more likely have in addition to their addiction problems.

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Comments

[Mike Block]

01:50 PM on 05/15/2012

Plain and simple:

"Drugs are bad, mkay."

Excelsior

[franks1996too]

04:01 PM on 05/09/2012

The use of any drug, legal or illegal, causes brain damage in which you lose your memory cells. In the long term you will be much slower at thinking and reacting, even though not using anymore. The best thing to do, is, "JUST SAY NO!"

[Timothy C Nissen]

12:45 PM on 05/15/2012

Does coffee? Does aspirin? And which drugs have you been taking to make you so stupid?

[Mike Block]

01:52 PM on 05/15/2012

enough coffee and enough aspirin will cause damage. Maybe not brain damage as the above (extreme thinking) person indicates, but they can cause damage.

Try not taking anything if you don't absolutely have to.

Excelsior.

[dbrett480]

02:25 PM on 04/27/2012

Good article. Since cocaine does this much damage, imagine what crack does considering we have no idea what the dealers are cutting the stuff with.

[Mary Niski]

10:11 AM on 04/26/2012

Did freebase one time. It was like a little explosion of pleasure in my brain and I immediately wanted to be naked and alone with the BF. It uses up ur dopamine too fast and the end result is poor cognition and Parkinson's disease. Alas I too worry about the Ritalin, both my boys were on it thru HS and my oldest is still on it in college.

[smoknjoe]

05:32 AM on 04/26/2012

Most of the folks I knew on cocaine were extremely skinny too.

[probo]

08:23 AM on 04/26/2012

very...

[jghilty]

09:43 PM on 04/25/2012

A cocaine or liberal brain?

[Retrorepublican]

12:54 PM on 04/26/2012

I come to the science section to avoid conservatives.

[djuno1966]

07:44 PM on 04/25/2012

Ridein that train, high on cocaine.........

let's ask Rick James, in the afterlife

[Roe DeVasto]

12:02 AM on 05/14/2012

or Jerry Garcia!

[knosiswar]

02:14 PM on 04/25/2012

Could you define Chronic use?

[Ashley Mackie]

01:47 PM on 04/25/2012

cocaine's a helluva drug.

[probo]

08:25 AM on 04/26/2012

It is and that's why I stay away....I know if I go there I won't ever return.

[mellow yellow]

12:50 PM on 04/25/2012

Ritalin is like legal coke, it does pretty much exactly the same thing to your brain. We've known that stimulants cause cogitative decline for a while which has always made me wonder why the frizuck we prescribe them to help people concentrate.

[ussuri]

12:03 PM on 04/25/2012

it eats your brain out, corrosive,poison.

[LarryFike]

11:45 AM on 04/25/2012

I'm not sure how this study will help us to interpret Sigmund Freud, who was a cocaine addict and even wrote a book titled: "Cocaine: The Wonder Drug."

[liephman88]

05:48 AM on 04/25/2012

Well that was a no brainer!

[Roe DeVasto]

12:03 AM on 05/14/2012

LOL

[Stephanie Keller Rohde]

05:46 AM on 04/25/2012

In my case when I looked further into my own "had to have after dinner ice cream" addiction I found out that it was in fact all the refined sweeteners in the ice cream that I was viciously addicted to. Making ice cream with raw milk, quality raw eggs, and raw honey is NOT addictive for my body in any way. This may be true for others as well. http://wwww.endtheclutter.com

[HCBurlingame]

11:40 AM on 04/25/2012

Some diabetics have found that the sugars they are having problems with often are corn based. Anybody with diabetes should log their glucose levels and the foods they eat.

[mellow yellow]

12:46 PM on 04/25/2012

You also probably put much less sugar in when you make it your self.

I've found that when i cut back on sugar, a little bit starts to taste a lot sweeter so i stop buying sweetened stuff in the store because it all starts to taste way too sweet and i just add sugar to things myself. When i cut back on the amount of sugar in my food, it becomes way less addicting.

[omgomghaxx]

05:31 AM on 04/25/2012

well this makes sense.. The people are more alert and using more of their mind so it dies faster.

[Retrorepublican]

12:57 PM on 04/26/2012

exercise improves health and longevity. But you may have a point. Palin should live forever since she doesn't use her brain at all.

[omgomghaxx]

05:11 AM on 04/27/2012

lol!! idk, I find her kinda sexy, when he says something legit.