Is there cognitive decline associated with drug use?The answer seems clear: yes. Drug use affects the brain in one way or another, sooner or later, and this always happens negatively.
Data show that more than 20,000 people die prematurely each year as a result of excessive alcohol consumption. We can’t forget that alcohol is also a drug, even if its use is normalized, but what about the rest of the drugs?
- Every year.
- Thousands of people enter hospitals for psychosis caused by all kinds of drugs and the trend is for that number to increase.
- Over the past 10 years.
- The number of drug-induced psychosis hospitalizations has increased by 103%.
Numerous research supports the idea of a deep deterioration associated with frequent drug use, in addition, there is a point where the impact of this use seems very difficult to reverse, even if consumption is interrupted indefinitely.
It is not easy to answer, in fact, it would be impossible to put all the cases together in a single case, it is true that today there is a genuine social concern about which there is great ignorance, also social. on drugs repeating themes and without restricting many mistakes and many nonsensical statements.
Drugs are usually associated with two conditions: youth and crime, so the information we can provide is already sesate from the outing, drug abuse creates serious health problems, as well as being the motivator of many crimes and the reason why many families end up being destroyed.
Thus, the frequent and intense use of drugs has an impact on the organism for which it is not prepared, on the other hand, these recreational substances cannot be isolated from the society that allowed their consumption to be exploited. The social environment appears not only as a facilitator, but also as a motivating factor, normalizing or distorting the negative effects of consumption or intensifying the problems that the person wants to escape.
Drug abuse can cause morphological changes in brain structure, these morphological changes have the following effects:
They can also cause adverse effects through metabolic reorganization of synaptic connectivity circuits. This metabolic reorganization results from the processes of tolerance, withdrawal and detoxification.
These processes, common to all addictions, cause biochemical adaptations in the dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine projection systems; these neurotransmitters interact with glutamate receptors and can block long-term boosting and depression mechanisms in the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens.
Finally, they can lead to changes in cerebral vascularity, vasoconstriction, cerebral and subarachnoid parenchymatous hemorrhages and ischemic stroke, so substance abuse seems to have many negative consequences, right?
We already know that cognitive decline associated with drug use is a reality, but how does drug use affect cognitive performance?
In terms of memory, people who consume more alcohol and cannabis, and less cocaine, have a greater deficit in working memory than in immediate memory, the longer the duration of consumption, the greater the impact on working memory.
In terms of executive functions, patients with a longer duration of cannabis and alcohol use have a lower ability to interfere, meaning they show less inhibition for automatic responses.
It is also noted that they have very little attention, needing more time to perform activities that require logical and sequential reasoning, however, they have a more preserved verbal fluidity in the phonological field compared to other types of consumption.
As we see, drug use involves neuropsychological and neuroanatomical changes that, in turn, cause a functional neuroadaptation of cognitive, motivational, behavioral and emotional functions that influence the daily psychosocial functioning and quality of life of people addicted to substances.
These role changes have to do with the ability to be attentive, focused, integrated, processing information and executing action plans, and these changes would also act as variables that underpin consumption in a broader and more ideological explanatory biopsychosocial model of addiction.