The upside of nicotine
Nicotine, when given independently from tobacco, could help protect the brain as it ages, and even ward off Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease, according to a Science Daily story citing research at Texas A&M University.
Ursula Winzer-Serhan, PhD, an associate professor at the Texas A&M College of Medicine, and her collaborators found that nicotine’s ability to be neuroprotective may be partly due to its well-known ability to suppress the appetite. Their research is published in the Open Access Journal of Toxicology.
Working with animals, Winzer-Serhan and her collaborators found that the group given the highest concentrations of nicotine ate less, gained less weight and had more receptors in the brain where nicotine acts, indicating that at higher doses, the drug gets into the brain where it can impact behavior.
However, even at high doses, nicotine didn’t seem to have behavioral side effects, such as making the individuals more anxious, which the researchers were concerned could happen.
“Some people say that nicotine decreases anxiety, which is why people smoke, but others say it increases anxiety,” Winzer-Serhan said. “The last thing you would want in a drug that is given chronically would be a negative change in behavior. Luckily, we didn’t find any evidence of anxiety: Only two measures showed any effect even with high levels of nicotine, and if anything, nicotine made animal models less anxious.”
Although early results indicate that nicotine can keep older individuals from gaining weight, Winzer-Serhan hasn’t yet determined whether this lower body mass index translates into less degeneration of the brain. It is also unclear if nicotine’s effects are related only to its ability to suppress appetite, or if there are more mechanisms at work.
“I want to make it very clear that we’re not encouraging people to smoke,” Winzer-Serhan said. “Even if these weren’t very preliminary results, smoking results in so many health problems that any possible benefit of the nicotine would be more than cancelled out. However, smoking is only one possible route of administration of the drug, and our work shows that we shouldn’t write-off nicotine completely.”
See the full report at: http://juniperpublishers.com/oajt/pdf/OAJT.MS.ID.555552.pdf.