I am a total layman, so could somebody explain the significance of this study? Obviously those substances alter the brain chemistry, that is not surprising, I think. How are those changes significant? Is there cause for concern?
There is really nothing surprising about the findings. Also note that the animals' brain tissues were analyzed 24 hours after last administration, so it says little to nothing about permanent effects (which have never been found in other studies, afaik). I really don't get why trivial/unsurprising findings like this raise so high on HN.
(It doesn't mean that we're necessarily wrong though).
> However, the combination of cannabis and caffeine mostly caused synergetic response in the level of the neurotransmitters; this implies that both substances produced their individual effects and did not cancel out the effects of one another. This is also expected since they bind primarily to various receptors. Thus, the resultant relative hyper increase is the cumulative effect of their individual influences.
I wonder if it is a more extreme version of drinking tea? Tea has a calming chemical (Theanine), and caffeine so you end up with more of a mellow energy instead of the hyper energy from coffee.
To be clear, there's evidence elsewhere that caffeine and cannabis can have a negative impact on the developing brain, but the data here don't really go in depth on that.
Cannabis affects the brain.
Using both together affects the brain more than we'd expect.
Probably don't let children[1] use cannabis or caffiene, but certainly protect them from heavy long term use of either.
[1] child is hard to define, but maybe anyone under 21.
Accidentally smoking your coffee and brewing your cannabis will make for a rough day I imagine
They also don't appear to have tested this solution for levels of THC, CBD, or anything else. Seems like a pretty poorly designed study. I'm somewhat surprised it even got published.