In order to get the concrete detrimental effects of marijuana use during pregnancy to fetal brain development, what must be mentioned is the study made by Tortoriello and his colleagues in The EMBO Journal called Miswiring the brain: delta9-tetrahydrocannabinoldisrupts cortical development by inducing an SCG10/stathmin-2 degradation pathway, which will be abbreviated as Tortoriello . Why it deserves that is that this study has got the exact result of the appointed question and it has employed an approach with a combination of pharmacological methods, organotypic slice preparations, quantitative and qualitative morphometric analysis and unbiased proteomic profiling, which be elaborately explained in the following.
II. The Effects of Marijuana Use during Pregnancy to Fetal Brain Development in Tortoriello Paper
Tortoriello has found that children exposed in utero to cannabis present permanent neuron-behavioral and cognitive impairments by showing that repeated THC exposure disrupts endocannabinoid signaling, particularly the temporal dynamics of CB1 cannabinoid receptor, to rewire the fetal cortical circuitry in that THC enables ectopic formation of filopodia and alters axon morphology, disabling the spatial specificity of endocannabinoid cues in the developing brain by indiscriminately activating CB1RS, even at unfavorable subcellular positions (Tortoriello et al, 2017).
Moreover, the findings also include that cannabis exposure of infants in utero or cannabis use in teenagers can coincide with critical periods of brain development when neuronal connectivity is prenatally established or postnatally refined to increase modularity and integrative capacity. Accordingly, prospective longitudinal assessments suggests that cannabis use during pregnancy can increase the risk for ill-behaviors, cognitive deficit, drug seeking, attention deficit, and anxiety and depression among affected neonatal or adolescent offspring (Tortoriello et al, 2017). In addition, this mentions that growth retardation and the developmental deficits in the nervous system are associated with maternal cannabis use.
In order for the concrete detrimental effects of marijuana use during pregnancy to fetal brain development, the authors established mouse models amenable to study the molecular underpinnings of life-long circuit modifications and during that experiment they noted that cannabis can introduce epigenetic modifications and attenuate synaptic neurotransmission as its psychoactive component THC will impair endocannabinoid-mediated mechanisms of cortical development, induce long-term structural and functional modifications of the cortical circuitry, bring in epigenetic modifications like repressive histone methylation, displace the binding of high-efficacy endocannabinoids while dampening the signaling efficacy, impair the cortical wiring map, axonal growth and guidance and the establishment of the corticofugal tract by disrupting endocannabinoid signaling (Tortoriello et al, 2017).
Among the above, the most important one is that THC will impair axonal growth and guidance as SCG10, contributing to the maintenance of cytoskeletal instability for axonal growth, will reduce in THC-exposed brains. SCG10, a bona fide target of THC, coincides with the formation of intra- and extracortical axonal trajectories and is mandatory to maintain dynamic microtubule instability required for axonal growth. SCG10, the degradation of which advances morphological growth cone differentiation, will undergo JNK-dependent degradation and fast anterograde axonal transport and accumulate in the central domain of advancing growth cones. In a word, the vast majority of the detrimental effects of marijuana to fetal brain development are the harm to the central nervous system, whose modifications can directly and permanently impair the wiring diagram of neuronal networks during corticogensis (Tortoriello et al, 2017).
With mouse models, the so-called experimental models, amenable in this experiment, it is so informative that the variables, non-variables and other relevant data can all be reflected in this model. What’s more, the mouse models being preferred also results from that this model can be well-controlled and are bound to get the experimenters the expected results as long as them can organize it orderly and logically under various situations without being affected by the outside changes.
The findings of this is unanimous with previously published results on the effects of Cannabis on brain development, what differentiates this from the previous ones is that this provides support for the past ones with more specific evidence and more impressive graphs and tables in a vivid and logical way. Furthermore, this has, in the meantime, supplied our readers the illustrations for each graph and table in order that we can get a better understanding of them through the awareness of the detrimental effects of marijuana to fetal brain development, leading to the use of marijuana's being reduced or more willingly decreased directly to zero due to the harm from a large extent. The several variables being excluded in the process of the experiment ensures the precision of the experiment’s result and at the same time endows them with more convincing and persuasive effects for readers so that we will get our attitudes serious and face the problem in a straight mode.
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