We talk a lot here about drug abuse and its many ripple effects. There’s a new one in the news: how gender affects the long-term effects of drug use on the brain. Here’s an excerpt from an article on the subject from Cassie Shirtsleeve for Yahoo! Health, followed by a link to the whole article. If you or someone you care for is using drugs, we hope this information makes a difference in choosing to seek help breaking the habit, and if you’re in the greater Cleveland area, we hope you’ll reach out to us regarding treatment options.
You probably know that abusing stimulants like cocaine, amphetamines, and methamphetamine doesn’t go hand in hand with long-term brain health. But what if the side effects were worse for one sex? That’s what a new study in the journal Radiology suggests: After abstaining for more than a year, women who were previously hooked on stimulants had notably less gray matter volume in their brains, while once-dependent men didn’t see such a change.
Gray matter is where everything that makes up a person — senses, language, memory, behavior, and thought — is organized, the study’s author, Michael Regner, MD, and PhD graduate student at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, tells Yahoo Health. So if you lose gray matter, you could perform worse in whichever area of the brain (think: language, emotion, memory, or cognition) the matter was lost, he explains.
The interesting part of the study: “Men had, overall, more drug-related symptoms than women, so the results were somewhat surprising,” Regner says. Even more surprising: Substance dependence is generally more common in men than in women, he says. This could be for a whole slew of reasons, but some research finds that guys may be more likely to externalize (instead of internalize) emotions — which can lead to impulsive behavior, like drug use.