Study Claims that Smoking Cannabis Ages the Brain Three Years
[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]A[/dropcap] new study on brain aging found that smoking cannabis ages the brain by almost three years.
The news was part of the results of the largest known brain imaging study. It evaluated the brain scans of over 31,000 individuals aged nine months to 105 years old. The consequent 62,454 single photon emission computed tomography images were studied by researchers from Amen Clinics, John Hopkins University, Google, UCLA and UC San Francisco.
The study’s scans came from a psychiatric clinic whose patients had many different psychiatric disorders. “This is one of the first population-based imaging studies, and these large studies are essential to answer how to maintain brain structure and function during aging,” said Dr. George Perry, chief scientist at the Brain Health Consortium from the University of Texas at San Antonio. “The effect of modifiable and non-modifiable factors of brain aging will further guide advice to maintain cognitive function.”
The study was to determine aging trajectories in the brain and what conditions or disorders sped up aging of the brain abnormally. Researchers studied 128 different regions of the brain to predict the chronological age of the patients and compare it to the actual age of the patient.
Several brain disorders and behaviors predicted accelerated aging of the brain, including schizophrenia (four years) cannabis consumption (2.8 years) and alcohol abuse (0.6 years). The researchers did not find accelerating aging in depression and aging, which they hypothesized may be due to those conditions having different brain patterns.
The results will be published in Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. “This paper represents an important step forward in our understanding of how the brain operates throughout the lifespan,” said Sachit Egan of Google. “The results indicate that we can predict an individual’s age based on patterns of cerebral blood flow. Additionally, groundwork has been laid to further explore how common psychiatric disorders can influence healthy patterns of cerebral blood flow.”
