Heavy Cocaine use = Brain cannibalization!
“A cell is like a household that is constantly generating trash,” coauthor Prasun Guha, a postdoc in Snyder’s lab, said in a press release. “Autophagy is the housekeeper that takes out the trash–it’s usually a good thing. But cocaine makes the housekeeper throw away really important things, like mitochondria, which produce energy for the cell.” Guha and colleagues published their results this week (January 18) in PNAS.