Abstract
Psychoactive substances are a class of chemical substances which could cause public health threats. Cognitive disorders are a category of mental health disorders that primarily affect cognitive abilities. Tau protein could maintain neuronal cytoskeleton stabilization. Post-translational modification of tau, especially phosphorylation, is an important way to regulate the structure and function of tau and phosphorylated tau is closely related to cognitive function. Lots of studies have reported the phenomenon that psychoactive substances can cause cognitive function impairment. We reviewed recent related studies and discussed them by drug classification. We mainly focused on cognitive disorders caused by acute or chronic exposure of each drugs, animal experiments and the mechanisms associated with tau phosphorylation, then compared the similarities and differences among them, trying to find out the common rules. The results suggested that tau phosphorylation is involved in psychoactive substance-induced cognitive disorder and different psychoactive substances may act by affecting amount or activity of different kinases and phosphatases in the metabolic pathway of tau. We demonstrated that tau protein is a potential target for psychoactive substances induced cognitive disorder treatments.
Highlights
Psychoactive drugs are substances that could change individuals’ consciousness, mood or thinking processes
We aim to explore the role of tau protein or tau phosphorylation in psychoactive substances-induced cognitive disorders (CDs)
The results indicated that MDMA treatment leads to dose-dependent impairments of spatial learning and memory [59] and repeated treatment of MDMA impaired working memory and reduced cognitive flexibility [60]
Summary
Psychoactive drugs are substances that could change individuals’ consciousness, mood or thinking processes. Based on these backgrounds, it is reasonable to speculate that tau could be a new diagnostic and therapeutic target for psychoactive substances-induced CDs. we selected 5 classes of representative drugs in psychoactive substances and reviewed related CDs and increasing of phosphorylation level of tau protein induced by them in detail and introduced other psychoactive substances-induced CDs briefly. We aim to explore the role of tau protein or tau phosphorylation in psychoactive substances-induced CDs. Three independent reviewers separately conducted the literature search on two databases, PubMed and Google Scholar. The inclusion criteria encompassed original works (including clinic studies and animal experiments) on the relationship between use of psychoactive substances and CDs in which tau phosphorylation plays a role.
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