Scientific American veers into “No, really?” territory with news that cocaine ages your brain prematurely:
“As we age we all lose gray matter,” Karen Ersche of the Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the new study, said in a prepared statement. But, she noted, “chronic cocaine users lose grey matter at a significantly faster rate, which could be a sign of premature aging.”
Ersche and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brains of 60 people ages 18 to 50 who used cocaine habitually and 60 healthy people of similar ages and IQs who did not. They found that on average, healthy individuals who didn’t use the drug lost about 1.7 milliliters of grey matter annually, whereas cocaine users were losing closer to 3.1 milliliters each year.
Cocaine users lost much more gray matter in the prefrontal and temporal regions—which help control memory, decision-making and attention—than non-users did.
The find brings a new insight into “why the cognitive deficits typically seen in old age have frequently been observed in middle aged chronic users of cocaine,” Ersche said.
It’s all that fast talking, is what it is. Don’t you think so? I really, really think so. Yeah, the fast talking, that’s what it is. And saying things over and over, yeah? That’s gotta have an effect.