Dr. Matthew Hill

speaker

614 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard Jul 2024

Dr. Matthew Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Huberman Lab · How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks | Dr. Matthew Hill · 8 Jul 2024 podcast

Let's say we're talking about explicitly an anxiety circuit. You know, there's individual variation that exists in humans across everything. So one of our predictions has been maybe people who are on the high end of the anxiety spectrum might be on the low end of their tonic anandamide signaling spectrum.

And we've gotten a little bit of support from that from animal work where we've screened animals based on anxiety and looked at endocannabinoid levels in the amygdala and found lower anandamide

Yeah.

There is some evidence to actually support it. So my buddy Sachin Patel, who's at Northwestern now, but he was at Vanderbilt when he did this study, they basically played with these drugs that you can use to prevent endocannabinoid synthesis. So you can create a state of like impaired endocannabinoid function. In humans? And they did this in rodents.

So this was done in mice. And they basically, but one of the questions was is, so A, does reductions in endocannabinoid function produce states of anxiety? And they did demonstrate that. So you could deplete endocannabinoid levels and you got the emergence of an anxiety state. So then you could give drugs that would boost the endocannabinoids to normalize this.

So, again, it kind of fit with the idea. But then they did one key study where then they gave THC and saw could THC fill in the gap. And they found that like boosting endocannabinoids, giving THC on a background of low endocannabinoids was able to reverse that anxiety phenotype and bring it back into more of the normal range. So, again –

Maybe for some people, this is, again, this is theoretical, so I don't know how much of a spectrum there is if there are people that are at this low end, but certainly I think from the animal literature, there's some foundation for making a theory that's similar to what you're saying, which is maybe some people are trying to fill in a gap of something that's deficient in them, and therefore that can help them feel less anxious.

And that, again, may be very different than someone who is very anxious for different reasons or has normal endocannabinoid function or something else might be at play there. So- Very interesting. Yeah, I think it could explain some of the heterogeneity that exists out there for sure, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we have definitely found in human populations through work I've done with a lot of clinical collaborators and others, like... We look at endocannabinoids in the blood, and it's not in the brain, but they are lipids that can move pretty easily back and forth.

And we have found relationships between peripheral endocannabinoid levels and mood states, both anxiety and kind of depressive measures, which does somewhat relate to... The possibility that this could be real, we don't know. It's been hard, obviously, for various reasons to really track this. But we've never looked at an anxiety disorder population.

We've done some work with post-traumatic stress disorder populations. There's been work in depression populations that have found some relationships that are pretty similar. So it's certainly a possibility. But again, this is all like our theory at this point. So we'll see as things kind of move forward if they pan out. But yeah.

Thanks. And I think it's also important. I think it's good, as you had said, that like for people to see that scientists can have disagreements. Absolutely. I think it's important. I think it's good that you kind of provided me an opportunity to correct the record and did so in a very appropriate manner. I think this was a great discussion for people to understand different perspectives.

Also good to highlight. where it was that I had had issue with your previous podcast. And I think the discussions that came out of that were for the better. So that's all the best. And hopefully if there's other contentious issues that happen down the road, similar things, move forward and you chat with people. Oh, I always, yeah.

And I think it's really good for people in the public to know this is how science progresses. This is, you know, someone says something, someone disagrees with it. You get an opportunity to clarify things. And I think that that's really good just to move things forward. So I think that was a good process that we've gone through.

Showing 601–614 of 614 · page 31 of 31