Lifestyle use of drugs by healthy people for enhancing cognition, creativity, motivation and pleasure

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Abstract

<p class="first" id="d3314366e174">Today, there is continued, and in some cases growing, availability of not only psychoactive substances, including treatments for mental health disorders such as cognitive enhancers, which can enhance or restore brain function, but also ‘recreational’ drugs such as novel psychoactive substances (NPS). The use of psychoactive drugs has both benefits and risks: whilst new drugs to treat cognitive symptoms in neuropsychiatric or neurodegenerative disorders could have great benefits for many patient groups, the increasing ease of accessibility to recreational NPS and the increasing lifestyle use of cognitive enhancers by healthy people means that the effective management of psychoactive substances will be an issue of increasing importance. Clearly, the potential benefits of cognitive enhancers are large and increasingly relevant, particularly as the population ages, and for this reason, we should continue to devote resources to the development of cognitive enhancers as treatments for neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia. However, the increasing use of cognitive enhancers by healthy individuals raises safety, ethical and regulatory concerns, which should not be ignored. Similarly, understanding the short‐ and long‐term consequences of the use of NPS, as well as better understanding the motivations and profiles of users could promote more effective prevention and harm reduction measures. </p><div class="section"> <a class="named-anchor" id="bph13813-sec-1001">  </a> <h5 class="section-title" id="d3314366e177">Linked Articles</h5> <p id="d3314366e179">This article is part of a themed section on Pharmacology of Cognition: a Panacea for Neuropsychiatric Disease? To view the other articles in this section visit <a data-untrusted="" href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.v174.19/issuetoc" id="d3314366e181" target="xrefwindow">http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.v174.19/issuetoc</a> </p> </div>

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Learning enhances adult neurogenesis in the hippocampal formation.

E. Gould, A Beylin, P Tanapat … (1999)

Thousands of hippocampal neurons are born in adulthood, suggesting that new cells could be important for hippocampal function. To determine whether hippocampus-dependent learning affects adult-generated neurons, we examined the fate of new cells labeled with the thymidine analog bromodeoxyuridine following specific behavioral tasks. Here we report that the number of adult-generated neurons doubles in the rat dentate gyrus in response to training on associative learning tasks that require the hippocampus. In contrast, training on associative learning tasks that do not require the hippocampus did not alter the number of new cells. These findings indicate that adult-generated hippocampal neurons are specifically affected by, and potentially involved in, associative memory formation.

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Synthetic cannabinoids: epidemiology, pharmacodynamics, and clinical implications.

Marisol Castaneto, David Gorelick, Nathalie A Desrosiers … (2014)

Synthetic cannabinoids (SC) are a heterogeneous group of compounds developed to probe the endogenous cannabinoid system or as potential therapeutics. Clandestine laboratories subsequently utilized published data to develop SC variations marketed as abusable designer drugs. In the early 2000s, SC became popular as "legal highs" under brand names such as Spice and K2, in part due to their ability to escape detection by standard cannabinoid screening tests. The majority of SC detected in herbal products have greater binding affinity to the cannabinoid CB1 receptor than does Δ(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive compound in the cannabis plant, and greater affinity at the CB1 than the CB2 receptor. In vitro and animal in vivo studies show SC pharmacological effects 2-100 times more potent than THC, including analgesic, anti-seizure, weight-loss, anti-inflammatory, and anti-cancer growth effects. SC produce physiological and psychoactive effects similar to THC, but with greater intensity, resulting in medical and psychiatric emergencies. Human adverse effects include nausea and vomiting, shortness of breath or depressed breathing, hypertension, tachycardia, chest pain, muscle twitches, acute renal failure, anxiety, agitation, psychosis, suicidal ideation, and cognitive impairment. Long-term or residual effects are unknown. Due to these public health consequences, many SC are classified as controlled substances. However, frequent structural modification by clandestine laboratories results in a stream of novel SC that may not be legally controlled or detectable by routine laboratory tests.