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Cocaine and crack cocaine can cause brain damage, even when used only a few times. The damage can trigger addiction, which is a disease involving the reward circuits and dopamine systems. Abusing this potent drug can also damage every parts of the body.
The drug directly interferes with dopamine being reabsorbed by neurons, one of the symptoms of a cocaine comedown is serious depression. Cocaine increases stress hormones like cortisol in the brain, which can raise blood pressure permanently, damaging the cardiovascular system.
People who struggle with cocaine addiction also show reduced levels of glucose metabolism in many areas of the brain, suggesting that neurons underperform or begin to die.
As a person grows older, their brain will naturally change and begin to lose gray matter. In a healthy brain, this is a decades-long process, and it does not appear until a person has reached older adulthood. Memory problems, changes in cognitive ability, and even dementia are linked to reduction of gray matter.
A recent study through the University of Cambridge examined the aging of the brain in people who abused cocaine and those who had no previous history of substance abuse. The group found that the average brain normally loses 1.69 milliliters of gray matter per year; however, people who had abused cocaine in the past, or who were currently cocaine-dependent, doubled the rate of gray matter loss, for an average of 3.08 milliliters per year.
Another study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University, found that cocaine may cause brain cells to cannibalize themselves. The study describes cocaine triggering autophagy in neurons in mice, or the process of the cells eating themselves from the inside out.
The cells threw out useful resources during metabolism, leading to a stress reaction of cannibalizing other internal cell structures. Mice whose mothers had been fed cocaine during pregnancy, but who were not cocaine-dependent themselves, also showed this phenomenon.
The unidentified patient, who went to the Mater Dei Hospital in Msida, Malta, was diagnosed with a condition called cocaine-induced leukoencephalopathy.
Leukoencephalopathy describes a progressive damaging of the brain which, in this man’s case, was caused by his taking so much cocaine. The man may have an infection in his brain, doctors gave him antibiotics and antiviral drugs but he continued to get more unwell.
He could remember hitting his head twice within the past two weeks and his parents said it had only been two days since he last took cocaine. The man’s condition then got worse and worse until he ended up in a coma and his muscles stiffened up.