Cannabis clogs the brain structures responsible for emotions and memory
There are conflicting data regarding the effects of prolonged use of marijuana, but recently there has been a growing amount of evidence of the negative effect of this drug on human health.
Many people consider marijuana relatively harmless and advocate its legalization. According to statistics, 2.1 million Americans annually join this source of pleasure, about 15 million use marijuana more than once a month, and 3.4 million – daily for a year or more. The scale of the disaster requires careful study of the long-term effects of prolonged marijuana use.
Australian scientists from the Universities of Melbourne and Wollongong, working under the guidance of Dr. Murat Yücel, used high-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of 15 men, whose average age was 39.8 years, who smoked 5 or more "joints" daily for 15 years. The results obtained were compared with the results of a survey of 16 drug-free individuals (average age 36.4 years). All participants were also tested for verbal memorization and examined for subthreshold symptoms of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and manic syndrome.
It turned out that marijuana lovers are characterized by smaller sizes of the hippocampus, which controls emotions and memory, and the amygdala involved in the formation of fear and aggression, compared with the control group (the volume of the hippocampus is on average 12% smaller, and the amygdala is 7.1% smaller). The relationship between the use of marijuana and the presence of subthreshold symptoms of psychotic disorders was also found. However, despite the fact that marijuana lovers showed worse results on verbal memorization tests than representatives of the control group, these results in none of the groups correlated with the volume of the mentioned brain regions.
The results obtained indicate the fallacy of the generally accepted opinion about the weak toxicity of marijuana or even about its complete harmlessness. Despite the fact that moderate use may not cause significant neurotoxic effects, active daily smoking of marijuana can be toxic to brain tissue. The authors believe that it is necessary to conduct a large-scale long-term study in order to study the degree and mechanisms of the toxic effect of marijuana and determine the duration of the recovery period of neurons after drug withdrawal.
Article By Murat Yucel et al. "Regional Brain Abnormalities Associated With Long-term Heavy Cannabis Use" published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru based on ScienceDaily materials
05.06.2008