Poorva Chavan
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Written By: Poorva Chavan | Updated : February 3, 2016 11:34 AM IST
The use of marijuana is a highly debated topic. It is an integral part of cancer treatment but it also has a variety of drawbacks. Studies have linked it to infertility, memory loss and diseases like schizophrenia. Now, a new study has found that marijuana use for over five years can also affect one's verbal memory. The study was carried out jointly by researchers at the University of California in San Francisco and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and was published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Read: Revealed: How marijuana causes memory loss!
The found that for every five years of marijuana use, one of out of every two people remembered one word less from a list of 15 words.
The study design
Researchers studied over 5000 adult participants enrolled in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. These participants had initially enrolled themselves in the study between ages 18 and 30. The study was carried out for 25 long years by following up with these participants. On every monthly follow-up visit, each participant revealed how many times he had used marijuana. Participants were given a series of cognitive tests that tested their verbal memory, processing speed and executive function. Read: Is Marijuana actually good for health?
The results
Researchers found that long-term marijuana use was linked to poor performance in all three tests. However, after adjusting for other factors such as use of other substances and depression, the link between marijuana use and verbal memory was statistically significant. The study points out that association between marijuana use and both processing speed and executive function may be just a coincidence. But, the study highlights a dose-dependent relationship between total lifetime exposure to marijuana and worsening verbal memory in the middle age. To simplify it means the more marijuana a person uses, the more the chances of his verbal memory declining.
How does marijuana affect verbal memory
The researchers believe that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the chemical responsible for marijuana's psychological effect, affects the way information is processed in the hippocampus, the area of the brain associated with emotions and memory.
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