Study looks at cannabis ingredient"s ability to help children"s tumours

British scientists are investigating whether a compound found in cannabis could be used to shrink brain tumours in children.

The study of the effects of cannabidiol (CBD), the non-psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, was prompted by a growing number of parents giving it to children with a brain tumour after buying it online. The lead researcher, Prof Richard Grundy of Nottingham University’s children’s brain tumour centre, said in the last six months there had been a surge in parents administering it without medical advice in the belief it might help.

While no research has been done into how CBD can help children’s brain tumours, some work has been done looking at how cannabis-based molecules can help adult cancer patients. Products containing cannabidiol can be bought online, although recent changes mean companies now require a licence to sell them.

“New ways to treat childhood brain tumours are urgently needed to extend and improve the quality of life in malignant brain tumour patients, so we are excited at the prospect of testing the effect of cannabidiol on brain tumour cells,” said Grundy.

Brain tumours kill more children in the UK than any other type of cancer. Around 1,750 under-18s each year are diagnosed with cancer, of which about 400 are cancers of the brain and spinal cord.

The study, thought to be the first of its kind in the world, will seek to establish whether CBD reduces tumours. The researchers will grow cells from different brain tumours in lab conditions, some with the addition of cannabidiol molecules and others without. They will then compare how the presence of tumour cells differs in both samples through a technique called cell staining. This will help them see how many of the cells are dividing and whether any are dying.

Grundy said: “We expect the cells – brain tumour and normal brain – grown in our standard conditions to be healthy and actively dividing. We expect that normal brain cells grown in cannabidiol will remain healthy. However, we expect the brain tumour cells grown in cannabidiol to stop growing and die.”

Katie Sheen, of the Astro Brain Tumour Fund, which is co-funding the study, said if it proved to be successful CBD could be a gentler, less toxic way of treating cancer than chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Dr Wai Liu, a research fellow at St George’s University of London, said: “We have performed experiments using CBD in leukaemia and it can deactivate signalling pathways, making cells more responsive to chemotherapy.”

He said some drug companies combined CBD with psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) with positive responses, especially when combined with chemotherapy.

Liu added: “All cells need to communicate and these communications get jammed up, and CBD tries to correct this by restoring them. This ultimately results in these cells being able to undergo cell death.”

“People think that children’s cells are more flexible so there is a possibility that CBD may have a slightly different effect. We will only be able to understand the precise mechanism and value of this treatment when studies like this are done.”

Among those supporting the project are the parents of William Frost, a four-year-old who was diagnosed with a ependymoma brain tumour in 2014 and is being treated at the Nottingham centre. William’s father, Steve, said: “We were told halfway through 2016 that nothing more could be done for William. We couldn’t bear to accept the news and decided to look into alternative treatments.

“We started William on a low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet and cannabidiol. Six months later William’s tumour had shrunk by two-thirds. He is slowly improving and attending school part-time.”

Study looks at cannabis ingredient"s ability to help children"s tumours

Coffee might increase brain"s ability to store extended-term recollections, examine claims

US researchers’ declare is the newest in a developing list of advantages that reasonable caffeine consumption appears to offer Photograph: Alamy

A cup or two of coffee could improve the brain’s capability to store extended-term memories, researchers in the US claim. Folks who had a shot of caffeine after hunting at a series of photographs were greater at distinguishing them from related photographs in tests the next day, the scientists discovered.

The process offers a measure of how exactly details is stored in the brain, which aids with a procedure known as pattern separation which can be critical in each day scenarios.

If the impact is real, and some scientists are doubtful, then it would add memory enhancement to the expanding record of positive aspects that moderate caffeine consumption would seem to offer.

Michael Yassa, a neuroscientist who led the examine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the potential to separate patterns was crucial for discriminating among similar scenarios and experiences in daily life.

“If you park in the same parking lot every single day, the spot you pick can search the same as a lot of other people. But when you go and appear for your car, you want to look for exactly where you parked it today, not in which you parked it yesterday,” he said.

Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Yassa described how 44 volunteers who were not hefty caffeine customers and had abstained for at least a day have been proven a quick sequence of images on a personal computer screen. The photos included a large variety of objects, this kind of as a hammer, a chair, an apple, a seahorse, a rubber duck and a auto.

When every single image flashed up on the display, the particular person viewing had to say whether the object was generally identified indoors or outdoors, but they have been not asked to memorise the images. At the end of the process, each volunteer was randomly assigned both a 200mg caffeine pill or a placebo. A standard cup of coffee contains about 150mg of caffeine.

The subsequent day, the scientists brought the volunteers back and sat them down at the laptop once again. This time, the sequence of images integrated a lot of they had noticed the day ahead of, but some have been new and others had been equivalent. The related images varied in how close to the originals they had been. Some showed the identical object from a different angle, even though others had been a equivalent variety of object, this kind of as a various design of hammer from the a single they had observed just before.

For this component of the study, the volunteers had to say regardless of whether each and every image was either new, outdated or similar to 1 they had noticed the day ahead of. In accordance to Yassa, the caffeine and placebo groups scored the same except when it came to spotting the similar pictures. In this task, the caffeine group scored all around ten% greater, he stated.

“What I’ve taken from this is that I ought to preserve drinking my coffee,” Yassa advised the Guardian. “Our examine suggests there’s a real finding out and memory advantage, but other studies recommend caffeine is connected with increased longevity, and a resistance to Alzheimer’s illness. In moderate amounts, it could have helpful effects for wellness.”

Yassa said it was unclear how caffeine might help the storage of memories, but 1 concept is that it leads to greater levels of a stress hormone known as norepinephrine in the brain, which assists recollections to be laid down.

Some scientists, nonetheless, say they want a lot more evidence to feel the impact. George Kemenes, a neuroscientist who studies memory at Sussex University, explained the statistical methods utilised in the paper were not excellent adequate to show the effect was genuine. “I have reservations. If the statistics are not proper the whole story, lovely as it is, unravels,” he explained.

“Even if this was solidly true, which in my see it isn’t, it would not show that caffeine has a memory-improving house. It would not get in touch with this an improvement in prolonged-phrase memory.”

Jon Simons, who functions on memory at Cambridge University, mentioned the examine was intriguing and meticulously developed, but the result necessary to be proven in a bigger quantity of individuals. “The claim that caffeine affects the consolidation of memories is primarily based on quite a little impact that would actually benefit from replication in a greater sample to be convincing,” he explained.

Coffee might increase brain"s ability to store extended-term recollections, examine claims