Guarding Your Brain Health

Healthy Aging

Brain, meet CB1 & CB2

The endocannabinoid system (aka, the ECS) may very well be the most important system in your body for establishing and maintaining your health. This series of Science Says covers the ECS and all the great things it does. Healthy brain, good mood, less pain, and better sleep? Yes, please. This week, let’s talk about how the ECS protects your brain health.

This is your brain on age

Remember that public service ad using a fried egg to demonstrate what happens to your brain on drugs? Well, that’s kinda also what happens to our brains when we age.

So, how do our brains age? Sebille describes in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience how increased physiological and oxidative stress, decreased neuronal mitochondrial function, inflammation, and metabolic dysregulation result in malfunctioning cells that cause our breakdown with age – including our brain’s cells. When our brains age, our neurons are damaged. And since we don’t tend to make new neurons, this damage increases with each passing year. This is why the following can happen as we get older:

• Slower cognitive processing
• Poor memory
• Depression
• Neurodegenerative diseases

Since we would all like to protect our brain health for as long as possible, let’s talk about the latest encouraging science on the ECS front.

CB1 & CB2 work together to protect your brain

Last week, we covered how the ECS is the ultimate body balancer, primarily by activating CB1 and CB2 receptors. By helping your body maintain homeostasis, the ECS can help maintain your overall health. Perhaps not surprisingly, numerous studies have shown that the ECS provides many benefits to your brain.

So, how does the ECS support your brain health? Reddy et al. describe how CB1 and CB2 work together to nurture your neurons:

• CB1 receptors work at the presynaptic level to calm overly excited neurons and help activate sluggish ones.
• CB2 receptors work at the postsynaptic level to respond to and taper threats, like inflammation and oxidative stress, that could otherwise harm your neurons.

Together, these two primary components of the ECS help to keep your brain in good shape. Alas, because our CB1 and CB2 guards start to falter as we get older, our brains do, too.

This is your brain on a reprimed ECS

The exciting news is that a slew of advancements are being made to better understand how to protect and restore our ECS to help protect our brains against time. Here are just a few examples:

• Tudorancea et al. review how both exogenous and endogenous cannabinoids can be used to activate CB1 and CB2, which can stem multiple hallmarks of aging and reverse aging-related breakdown, including in the brain.
• In Aging Research Reviews, Kumar et al. discuss how our circadian rhythms get out of whack as we get older, which may increase the risk of dementia – and how restoring our ECS may help reverse both age-related conditions.
• Helping to support our ECS may also help support our mental health, too. Sharafi et al. review how the ECS is being targeted to help keep our moods bright and sunny.

Given this encouraging science, the world will undoubtedly be learning much more about how we can tap into the ECS to protect our brain health against aging-related breakdown. Stay tuned!