TY  - JOUR
A1  - Walter, Carmen
A1  - Oertel, Bruno Georg
A1  - Felden, Lisa
A1  - Nöth, Ulrike
A1  - Deichmann, Ralf
A1  - Lötsch, Jörn
T1  - Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol reduces the performance in sensory delayed discrimination tasks : a pharmacological-fMRI study in healthy volunteers
T2  - IBRO reports
N2  - Background: Cannabis proofed to be effective in pain relief, but one major side effect is its influence on memory in humans. Therefore, the role of memory on central processing of nociceptive information was investigated in healthy volunteers.
Methods: In a placebo-controlled cross-over study including 22 healthy subjects, the effect of 20 mg oral Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) on memory involving nociceptive sensations was studied, using a delayed stimulus discrimination task (DSDT). To control for nociceptive specificity, a similar DSDT-based study was performed in a subgroup of thirteen subjects, using visual stimuli.
Results: For each nociceptive stimulus pair, the second stimulus was associated with stronger and more extended brain activations than the first stimulus. These differences disappeared after THC administration. The THC effects were mainly located in two clusters comprising the insula and inferior frontal cortex in the right hemisphere, and the caudate nucleus and putamen bilaterally. These cerebral effects were accompanied in the DSDT by a significant reduction of correct ratings from 41.61% to 37.05% after THC administration (rm-ANOVA interaction "drug" by "measurement": F (1,21) = 4.685, p = 0.042). Rating performance was also reduced for the visual DSDT (69.87% to 54.35%; rm-ANOVA interaction of "drug" by "measurement": F (1,12) = 13.478, p = 0.003) and reflected in a reduction of stimulus-related brain deactivations in the bilateral angular gyrus.
Conclusions: Results suggest that part of the effect of THC on pain may be related to memory effects. THC reduced the performance in DSDT of nociceptive and visual stimuli, which was accompanied by significant effects on brain activations. However, a pain specificity of these effects cannot be deduced from the data presented.
KW  - Cannabis
KW  - Human
KW  - Pharm-fMRI
KW  - Pain
KW  - Clincial pharmacology
KW  - Pharmacometrics
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/51721
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-517213
SN  - 2451-8301
N1  - © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of International Brain Research Organization. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/).
VL  - 7
SP  - 117
EP  - 128
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -