It used to be that when we thought of cannabis users, we pictured hippies or burnouts. However, with shifts in culture and the many medical uses for cannabis, the user base has changed. Once upon a time, cannabis news wouldn’t have been pertinent to Glucocil customers. Now, all sorts of people use cannabis.
Whether you or a loved one does, it’s essential to know that daily cannabis use may alter structures in the brain linked to decision-making and planning, according to a study from the Fidmag Germanes Hospitalàries Research Foundation. While it’s viewed as low-risk and harmless, it can have a serious impact on the body. Long-term use of the drug is linked to “thinning” in the frontal cortex of the brain of people who smoked cannabis daily for at least five years. The area is responsible for high-level planning and executive function.
“Executive functions are really complex processes and it includes planning, decision making, working memory. They are processes that we need every day to deal with daily problems,” said lead author of the study Ana Aquino-Servin. “Maybe they [regular cannabis users] don’t have a big struggle to do [tasks], but maybe the brain needs to do more work to do it. We can probably find degrees in productivity, also, in doing work tasks. I think another issue that can be going on here is the relation between [cannabis] use and a decrease of motivation. There’s some evidence that cannabis users have less motivation … So this can also lead to a reduction of starting tasks.”
The team said more research is needed to know if the changes are definitely caused by cannabis use and if they are permanent or if they could be reversible. Other work has found the drug impacts the frontal lobe of young adults and teens, but this is the first to find structural differences in adults because of long-term use.
As well as physically impacting the brain, cannabis may reshape memory, according to research from Washington State Univ. It can not only impair someone’s ability to recall something accurately, but it may add details that were never there. In the study, when given a list of words to remember, people who were regular THC users were more likely to recall words that weren’t on the list and struggled to remember to do things later. Using a battery of tests, researchers found cannabis impacted 15 out of 21 major measurements of memory. The most strongly affected issues were false memories and source memories. People had a hard time remembering things accurately. And if they could remember things, they couldn’t remember where they learned the information from.
“Most previous studies have only looked at one or two types of memory, like recalling lists of words,” said Carrie Cuttler, senior author of the study and an associate professor of psychology at WSU. “This is the first study to comprehensively examine many different memory systems at once, and what we found is that acute cannabis intoxication appears to broadly disrupt most of them.”
There are many reasons why people use cannabis. It has many legitimate medical uses. In many parts of the country, it is legal for recreational use. However, you should be aware of all of the drawbacks of any substance you put in your body to make informed choices for yourself. If you use cannabis, you may want to talk to your doctor about the risks it can pose to you.
