Cannabis helps arthritic mice in UConn laboratory
Arthritic mice don’t climb much. University of Connecticut professor Steve Kinsey determined this with what he called a “super low-tech test.”
“You just give them some wire mesh like you’d use out in the garden ... and just make a little coil of the stuff and let them climb on it and they love to climb, unless they have arthritis. Then they don’t clim bso much,” he said.
That is, at least, until you give them cannabis, in this case delta-8.
“Then they would climb at the same rate as the non-arthritic mice,” Kinsey said.
Kinsey’s study, recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, looks at the effect of delta-8 cannabis on arthritis in mice.
Mice, he said, experience inflammatory arthritis in a similar way that humans do. They also experience cannabis in a similar way.
So while preliminary results show the substance might help some people with what’s often a debilitating disease, it’s also on the Attorney General’s hit list for the way it’s sold.
A legal gray area
Delta-8 is considered a minor cannabinoid, one of many compounds found naturally in cannabis.
“The cannabis plant has all kinds of different chemicals in it that do different things. The one that we’ve been really focused on, since the ’60s, since 1965, is delta-9 THC,” Kinsey said. “That’s the main psychotropic, psychoactive component in cannabis that gets people high, given them the munchies, affects memory, has some antidepressant effects, and has anti-inflammatory properties.”
Delta-8, however, is naturally produced at very low levels in the plant: “Regular cannabis flower won’t have a lot of delta-8
THC in it,” Kinsey said.
But another compound called cannabidiol, also known as CBD, can be chemically converted into delta-8. CBD can be legally produced in large amounts in hemp, which has allowed the sale of hemp-derived cannabis products to be sold at smoke shops and gas stations around the country.
Last year, state Attorney General William Tong announced a crackdown on delta-8 products, saying at the time: “Our undercover investigation revealed widespread sale of untested, unregulated, delta-8 edibles mimicking popular youth snacks.”
How cannabis reduces arthritis
While Tong is cracking down on the sale of delta-8 products, Kinsey is injecting it into mice and finding that it can actually reduce inflammation associated with arthritis. Kinsey and his team inject the mice with delta-8 and then measure the inflammation in their paws. Not only does the inflammation seem to be alleviated using the same calculation, but the arthritic mice are also more inclined to climb.
There are receptors in both mice and humans, called cannabinoid receptors, designed to process various compounds found in cannabis.
“The sort of dogm a is that CB1 is responsible for the psychotropic effects of THC, so it’s behind the munchies and all that, whereas CB2 is expressed more on immune cells and is responsible for anti-inflammatory effects,” Kinsey said.
So the goal, he added, is to find a way to impact the second receptor without impacting the first, offering the anti-inflammatory effect of THC without the high.
“The problem of blocking the CB1 is that we have these receptors because our bodies make our own cannabinoids as neurotransmitters, so we need them,” Kinsey said “So if you block CB1, you block the munchies and that type of stuff ... but you also block those effects of your natural endocannabinoid system.”
“It seems like the endocannabinoids do a lot of different things in our bodies, especially in our brains,” Kinsey said. It would be nice to be able to “turn it down a little bit without completely blocking it.”
For now, though, the mice do appear to get high on delta-8.
“We can’t really know what happens in their heads,” Kinsey said. Their eyes get puffy, they get tired and they eat more, all of which is a giveaway. Though, “it’s tricky to tell sometimes whether they have memory issues.”
Federal law and funding
As for moving his tests to the next logical step — human trials — Kinsey said federal law makes that “difficult to do.”
Cannabis is still registered as a Schedule 1 drug with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which means it officially has no medical benefit despite studies to the contrary, such as Kinsey’s.
But that designation makes it difficult to obtain federal funding to study the effects of cannabinoids.
“We’re really dependent on federal funding, and so we want to do everything we can to follow the federal rules,” Kinsey said. “The way that the lab gets regulated, it’s as though we’re a small pharmacy, and we’re dealing with Schedule 1 compounds, which supposedly have no medical application and yet now we have research showing that there are different applications for THC.”
Kinsey noted the irony of studying, with federal funding, the medical benefits of a substance the federal government says has no medical benefits, but which residents of Connecticut and other states can use legally and have delivered to their homes.
“It is a funny time to live in, where you can have the stuff delivered to your house or an address across the street from campus, but if you bring it near campus, then it’s definitely a Schedule 1 compound, and you have to have a permit and a whole bunch of paperwork,” Kinsey said. “The research and the laws and the marketing are all kind of going at different rates.”