Three rare cannabinoids present in cannabis would reduce epileptic seizures.
- Researchers found three rare cannabinoid acids that reduced epileptic seizures in mice with Dravet syndrome, a childhood form of the disease.
- This discovery opens the way to a new therapeutic avenue.
Is cannabis the future of treatment for epilepsy? While this neurological disorder affects approximately 700,000 people in France, more and more studies highlight the positive effects of certain cannabinoids present in cannabis to relieve epileptic seizures.
Among them, new works published in the British Journal of Pharmacology. Its authors, pharmacologists from the University of Sydney (Australia), report for the first time that three acidic cannabinoids found in cannabis reduce seizures in a mouse model of Dravet syndrome. It is an intractable form of childhood epilepsy that is characterized by frequent seizures and causes delays in cognitive and motor development. Often, conventional therapies do not provide adequate seizure control and patients have a reduced quality of life.
“From the beginning of the 19th century, cannabis extracts were used in Western medicine to treat seizures, but the prohibition of cannabis prevented the advancement of science, said Associate Professor Jonathon Arnold of the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics and Sydney School of Pharmacy. Now we are able to explore how compounds from this plant can be adapted to modern therapeutic treatments.”
Cannabis research since 2015
Work began in 2015, when the University of Sydney received a historic $33.7 million gift from Barry and Joy Lambert to fund long-term research into the medicinal potential of the cannabis plant. Their granddaughter Katelyn indeed suffers from Dravet syndrome and they have seen a dramatic improvement in her state of health thanks to a cannabis extract. So they established a preclinical epilepsy research program to help understand how cannabis extracts, a blend of hundreds of bioactive molecules, have anticonvulsant effects.
“Our research program is to systematically test whether different constituents of cannabis reduce seizures in a mouse model of Dravet syndrome. We started by testing the compounds individually and found several constituents of cannabis with anticonvulsant effects”explains Professor Arnold.
A significant reduction in seizures
In this latest paper, researchers demonstrate the anticonvulsant effects of three rarer cannabinoids. These are acidic cannabinoids, which are cannabinoids biosynthesized in the plant and found in craft cannabis extracts used to treat children with epilepsy. One of these cannabinoids, cannabigerolic acid (CBGA), is, according to Professor Arnold the “mother of all cannabinoids” because it is the precursor molecule for the creation of more well-known cannabinoids, such as cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).
According to the researchers, CBGA is more potent than CBD in reducing seizures in a mouse model with Dravet syndrome. The team is therefore continuing their research in hopes of developing a cannabis-based treatment for Dravet syndrome.
“We evaluated the cannabinoids one by one and now we are exploring what happens when you put them all together. There is a real possibility that all of these individual anti-convulsant cannabinoids will be more effective when combined”says Dr. Anderson.
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