“Navigation of retinal projections towards their targets is regulated by guidance molecules and growth cone transduction mechanisms. Here, we present in vitro and in vivo evidences that the cannabinoid receptor 2 (CB2R) is expressed along the retino-thalamic pathway and exerts a modulatory action on axon guidance….
Overall, this study demonstrates that the contribution of endocannabinoids to brain development is not solely mediated by CB1R, but also involves CB2R.”
“Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder of significant prevalence and morbidity, whose pathogenesis relies on paradoxical changes of emotional memory processing. An ideal treatment would be a drug able to block the pathological over-consolidation and continuous retrieval of the traumatic event, while enhancing its extinction and reducing the anxiety symptoms. While the latter benefit from antidepressant medications, no drug is available to control the cognitive symptomatology. Endocannabinoids regulate affective states and participate in memory consolidation, retrieval, and extinction. Clinical findings showing a relationship between Cannabis use and PTSD, as well as changes in endocannabinoid activity in PTSD patients, further suggest the existence of a link between endocannabinoids and maladaptive brain changes after trauma exposure. Along these lines, we suggest that endocannabinoid degradation inhibitors may be an ideal therapeutic approach to simultaneously treat the emotional and cognitive features of PTSD, avoiding the unwanted psychotropic effects of compounds directly binding cannabinoid receptors.”
“In contextual fear conditioning animals have to integrate various elemental stimuli into a coherent representation of the condition and then associate context representation with punishment. Although several studies indicated the modulating role of endocannabinoid system (ECS) on the associative learning, ECS effect on contextual fear conditioning requires further investigations. The present study assessed the effects of the increased endocannabinoid anandamide (AEA) tone on acquisition, retrieval and extinction of the contextual fear conditioning…
The present study indicates that ECS controls the extinction of aversive memories in the contextual fear conditioning.”
“A number of studies have reported that patients with psychosis who use cannabis have better cognitive performance than those who do not.
… we tested the hypothesis that patients who smoked cannabis would have a higher premorbid IQ than patients who did not.
Patients who had ever smoked cannabis had significantly higher current and premorbid IQ compared to patients who had never used cannabis…”
“Cancer patients using cannabis report better influence from the plant extract than from synthetic products… We followed patients with a medicinal cannabis license to evaluate the advantages and side effects of using cannabis by cancer patients…
All cancer or anticancer treatment-related symptoms showed significant improvement.
No significant side effects except for memory lessening in patients with prolonged cannabis use were noted.
Conclusion. The positive effects of cannabis on various cancer-related symptoms are tempered by reliance on self-reporting for many of the variables. Although studies with a control group are missing, the improvement in symptoms should push the use of cannabis in palliative treatment of oncology patients.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23956774
Full Text: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/2013/510392/
““It’s time for us to recognize that marijuana does not do harm,” said Grosso. “It’s not a gateway drug like people think it is. It’s not causing massive accidents or causing people to go crazy on the streets. And it’s just leading a lot of kids right to jail…””
“Despite anti-drug education campaigns which state marijuana is a gateway for harder drug use, new research from the University of New Hampshire says for most people that’s not true.” “But pot does serves as a “gateway,” says Dr. Karen Van Gund, associate professor of sociology., mainly for young people who are poor, unemployed, and subjected to severe psychological stress. In other words, the path to other drugs is not necessarily the pot, but rather the potholes young people encounter on the road.”
“We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the typical pot smoker — a lumpy, lazy couch potato with one hand wrapped around the remote and the other elbow-deep in a bag of nacho cheese Doritos.
But new research out of France gives a different spin to the stereotypical stoner.
“Cannabis is supposed to increase appetite,” says Dr. Yann Le Strat, a psychiatrist at Louis-Mourier Hospital in Colombes, France and co-author of a new study in the American Journal of Epidemiology. “So we hypothesized that cannabis users would be more likely to have higher weight than non-users and be more likely to be obese.”
Instead, Le Strat and his colleagues found just the opposite.
“We found that cannabis users are less likely to be obese than non-users,” he says. “We were so surprised, we thought we had [made] a mistake. Or that our results were due to the sample we studied. So we turned to another completely independent sample and found exactly the same association…”
“I know when we think about smoking pot, one of the jokes is that it gives you the munchies and dry mouth so you drink a bunch of water and eat a bunch of Cheetos,” she says.
“Maybe we need to adjust the stereotype.””
More: http://www.nbcnews.com/health/pot-smokers-skinnier-non-tokers-study-says-1C6437141