Since the beginning of the year went into effect banning smoking in public places and entertainment in Spain, although controversial for several reasons what is indisputable is that the snuff has harmful health effects. Most smokers started to do adolescents, partly because it is at this time of human development that show an impulsive behavior, where anything bold, attention-grabbing and the consequences are outweighed by the attraction of time. Adolescence is a distinct period and it is also in the structure of the brain, at this stage the connections are reorganized, many connections are lost, others are reinforced and even for example has seen an increased presence of CB1R cannabinoid receptors in the brain teen (communication Miriam Schneider, Mannheim). So while it would certainly be better to provide this first puff at this age can be a difficult problem to tackle.
has been reported that teen smokers experience problems with attention deficits and working memory (short term, the type of memory that lets you remember a phone number just as you have just to say and so long as brands, but since there phones maybe the example is a bit old) and adults who may have behavioral problems and compromised mental health (although these terms so vague to me leave me a bit cold the truth). The question one may ask is the type: What came first: the chicken or the egg?
I mean, that nicotine may be responsible for the effects on youth smoking behavior or they might be people who already have some type of advance psychological peculiarities who would be more attracted to snuff. In line with the latter possibility, in adults with schizophrenia are known to more than 90% of them smoke, but given that schizophrenia is a disease that is triggered by puberty, the question still remains in the air.
As there are certain types of experiments that can not be done with humans, among other reasons because waiting since the beginning of a study of adolescents to the maturity analysis does not make sense in terms of time, so the authors of a paper published in Nature Neuroscience a couple of weeks ago used rats administered nicotine during adolescence "ratil" other control rats treated with nicotine in adult and that adult and then subjected to a type of behavioral test or test reaction time of 5 options series. The test works as follows: a light will illuminate one of the 5 holes and if the rat sticks his nose in it will reward a little food, if you make a mistake and puts his nose in a hole is on or not gets nowhere gets nothing, the same happens if the rat gets his nose in a hole when there is no light on. With this test, the researchers measured two properties in rats: impulsiveness, if the rat gets his nose everywhere where there is no light, and lack of care if the rat "lost" when the light is on because something else, ie in the shrews.
Figure left you can see the precision with which the rats got his nose in the correct hole (when there was light) and you can see that the rats treated with nicotine in adolescence (black bar) missed significantly less than those treated with saline or the adults who were also exposed to nicotine. On the right, premature responses are measured, ie, impulsivity, and you can see how rats from puberty nicotinizadas holes attacked far more often than any of the other controls. So it seems that the effect of nicotine in rats is unique treatment in adolescence and affects the care, attention deficit causing an increase in impulsivity.
As at the physiological changes they found, (and this is the second reason why you can not use humans for this type of experiments) in the prefrontal cortex of adult rats treated with nicotine were teenagers changes in the expression of glutamate receptor (mGluR2) is important because it is the excitatory neurotransmitter receptor par excellence of the nervous system, these rats showed a reduced expression of this receptor that conferred a response therefore also decreased compared to the action of glutamate and it is found responsible for at least part of the observed behavioral effects, namely the lack of attention, in fact, treatment with a receptor agonist, which increases its function is able to rescue the attention deficit in rats nicotine in adolescence. However, impulsivity seems to be independent of the mGluR2 receptor action which gives an idea of \u200b\u200bthe extent of the effects of nicotine on the developing nervous system.
So little left to say apart from the obvious, if still time to avoid it do not start smoking and if you can not go back to your 15 years to say NO looking at the bright side How much you can learn through a little lack of attention in the Internet age with all that information available?
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