Association of cannabis with glutamatergic levels in patients with early psychosis: Evidence for altered volume striatal glutamate relationships in patients with a history of cannabis use in early psychosis.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Sami, Musa Worker, Amanda Colizzi, Marco Annibale, Luciano Das, Debasis Kelbrick, Marlene Eranti, Savitha Collier, Tracy Onyejiaka, Chidimma O’Neill, Aisling Lythgoe, David McGuire, Philip Williams, Steve C. R. Kempton, Matthew J. Bhattacharyya, Sagnik
Abstract	The associative striatum, an established substrate in psychosis, receives widespread glutamatergic projections. We sought to see if glutamatergic indices are altered between early psychosis patients with and without a history of cannabis use and characterise the relationship to grey matter. 92 participants were scanned: Early Psychosis with a history of cannabis use (EPC = 29); Early Psychosis with minimal cannabis use (EPMC = 25); Controls with a history of cannabis use (HCC = 16) and Controls with minimal use (HCMC = 22). Whole brain T1 weighted MR images and localised proton MR spectra were acquired from head of caudate, anterior cingulate and hippocampus. We examined relationships in regions with known high cannabinoid 1 receptor (CB1R) expression (grey matter, cortex, hippocampus, amygdala) and low expression (white matter, ventricles, brainstem) to caudate Glutamine+Glutamate (Glx). Patients were well matched in symptoms, function and medication. There was no significant group difference in Glx in any region. In EPC grey matter volume explained 31.9% of the variance of caudate Glx (p = 0.003) and amygdala volume explained 36.9% (p = 0.001) of caudate Glx. There was no significant relationship in EPMC. The EPC vs EPMC interaction was significant (p = 0.042). There was no such relationship in control regions. These results are the first to demonstrate association of grey matter volume and striatal glutamate in the EPC group. This may suggest a history of cannabis use leads to a conformational change in distal CB1 rich grey matter regions to influence striatal glutamatergic levels or that such connectivity predisposes to heavy cannabis use.
Volume Number	10
PubMed Central reference number	PMC7174331
Issue Number	1
PubMed reference number	32317625
Journal	Translational Psychiatry [Transl Psychiatry]
e-ISSN	21583188
DOI	10.1038/s41398-020-0790-1
Language	English
Publisher	Nature Publishing Group UK
Publisher Date	2020-04-21
Publisher Place	London
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2020
Subject Keyword	Molecular neuroscience Schizophrenia
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Biological Psychiatry Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Psychiatry and Mental Health