A new study has just concluded that smoking marijuana can increase the age of your brain by an average of three years.
The study, which was carried out by the Journal of Alzheimer’s disease, found that cannabis ages the brain by 2.8 years, which makes it even worse for the mind than bipolar disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The researchers who carried out the study looked at 62,454 brain scans from 31,227 people, and their goal was to understand brain aging, which they defined as reduced blood flow through the organ. The scans came from people between the ages of nine months and 105 years-old, and they were collected during times of both rest and concentration.
The researchers looked at the blood flow through 128 regions of the brain to determine how old they thought the individual was. They then compared this to the actual age of the person, which allowed them to see how much marijuana use actually aged the brain.
“The cannabis abuse finding was especially important, as our culture is starting to see marijuana as an innocuous substance,” said Dr. Daniel Amen, the study’s lead author. “This study should give us pause about it.”
“The results indicate that we can predict an individual’s age based on patterns of cerebral blood flow,” added fellow author Sachit Egan. “Additionally, the groundwork has been laid to further explore how common psychiatric disorders can influence healthy patterns of cerebral blood flow.”
The study also concluded that bipolar disorder increases brain aging by 1.6 years, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by 1.4 years.
“Based on one of the largest brain imaging studies ever done, we can now track common disorders and behaviors that prematurely age the brain,” Amen said. “Better treatment of these disorders can slow or even halt the process of brain aging.”
With marijuana consumption becoming more and more common in the United States, the findings of this study are more important now than ever before. Please help us spread the word about these findings to educate more people on the effects of marijuana use.
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