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Melatonin worsens asthma + Cannabis may contain heavy metals & affect consumer health

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Cannabis may contain heavy metals and affect consumer health
https://scienceblog.com/527286/cannabis-...er-health/

INTRO: Cannabis plants — which are used to produce industrial hemp, medical marijuana and cannabidiol (CBD) oil, among other products — have an inherent ability to absorb heavy metals from the soil, making them useful for remediating contaminated sites. But this ability to soak up toxic metals may also make cannabis dangerous for consumers who ingest it.

A new meta-analysis, led by researchers at Penn State, examines the ability of cannabis plants to absorb heavy metals and discusses the resulting health impacts on consumers. The team proposes a blueprint of strategies for growers to alleviate heavy-metal uptake by their crops.

“Heavy metals, such as lead, mercury, cadmium and chromium, are known to be carcinogenic,” said Louis Bengyella, assistant research professor of plant science, Penn State. “The heavy-metal content of cannabis is not regulated; therefore, consumers could unknowingly be exposed to these toxic metals. This is bad news for anyone who uses cannabis but is particularly problematic for cancer patients who use medical marijuana to treat the nausea and pain associated with their treatments.”

Compounding the problem, Bengyella said, is the fact that some cannabis strains have been bred specifically for phytoremediation, which is the use of plants to remove pollutants from soil, water or air. “The problem is if we use these strains that were developed for phytoremediation without considering why they were developed in the first place, we may unknowingly expose consumers to heavy metals,” he said... (MORE - details)


Melatonin exacerbates asthma, study finds
http://www.tohoku.ac.jp/en/press/melaton...sthma.html

RELEASE: Patients with asthma often experience a worsening of asthmatic symptoms at night in so-called "nocturnal asthma." According to reports, more than 50% of asthma deaths occur at night, exposing a link between nocturnal asthma symptoms and asthma deaths. Although some have proposed several triggers that explain the pathogenesis of nocturnal asthma, the precise mechanisms regulating this asthma phenotype remain obscure.

Now, a research group led by Kentaro Mizuta from Tohoku University Graduate School of Dentistry has discovered that melatonin, a sleep hormone, worsens asthma.

Asthma patients suffer from bronchoconstriction, where the smooth muscles of the bronchus -- the pathway that moves air to and from your lungs -- contract. To ease this, many take a bronchodilator, a medicine which widens the bronchus.

However, melatonin, which is often prescribed for insomnia, favors a state of bronchoconstriction and weakens the relaxing effect of a bronchodilator through the activation of the melatonin MT2 receptor.

To elucidate this, the research group identified the expression of the melatonin MT2 receptor in human airway smooth muscle. They observed that the activation of the melatonin MT2 receptor with higher doses of melatonin or melatonin receptor agonist ramelteon greatly potentiated the bronchoconstriction. Furthermore, melatonin attenuated the relaxing effects of the widely used bronchodilator β-adrenoceptor agonist.

"Although serum concentration of melatonin did not significantly induce the airway constriction, greater doses of melatonin, which is clinically used to treat insomnia, jet lag, or cancer, worsened asthma symptoms and impaired the therapeutic effect of bronchodilators," said Mizuta.

First author of the paper Haruka Sasaki adds, "The pharmacological therapy that blocks the melatonin MT2 receptor could inhibit the detrimental effects of melatonin on airways."

The research paper was published in the American Journal of Physiology Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology.
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