Cocaine Makes Your Brain Cannibalize Itself, Study Says

A new study from Johns Hopkins University says that large doses of cocaine could make your brain literally eat itself.

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A new study by Johns Hopkins University says that large doses of cocaine can cause your brain to "cannibalize" itself. Understanding what that actually means requires diving deeper into the study, but we probably don't have to tell you, that's a bad thing. 

As Huffington Post points out, the new study which looked at the brains of mice that were given cocaine found that the drug can make the neurons go into "overactive autophagy." Autophagy is a normal process that allows cells to deal with waste, but when it spins out of control, which cocaine can cause, the cells digest themselves and die, the study showed.

The study even referred to this reaction as the brain cells "committing suicide." The study showed that this brain suicide didn't happen only in mice that were given cocaine, but also in the babies of mice that were given coke while they were pregnant. 

On the positive side, researchers found that certain compounds were effective in preventing the out of control autophagy, so maybe some day doctors will have a way to fix your suicidal, cannibal coke-brain after you've ruined it with too many late nights of ducking into bathroom stalls.

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