Cannabis: Teen drug damages brain, says new study in Canada



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Scientists have uncovered new evidence that cannabis, usually smoked by young people, is harmful to health.

Canadian researchers have stated that young people who regularly smoke marijuana suffer from reasoning, memory and inhibitions later in life.

The team says its findings are the first to show the lasting effects of marijuana use on cognitive development.

The bomb comes as the drug must be legalized in Canada later this month.

And in the UK, the ministers announced that doctors would be free to prescribe the drug by the end of the year.

Previous research has shown that children who started using marijuana before the age of 16 have a higher risk of permanent brain damage and a much higher incidence of psychiatric disorders.

And now, experts from the University of Montreal in Canada have said that smoking marijuana is worse than drinking alcohol.

They followed almost 4,000 teenagers between the seventh and tenth year over four years.

Once a year, participants rated their cannabis use on a scale of zero to five – zero meaning never and five each day.

*** It's how long the drugs and alcohol really stay in your body ***

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With respect to alcohol in particular, teens were asked to provide the typical number of drinks they drink during a day.

The researchers also examined changes that occurred from one year to the next in four cognitive domains: recall memory, working memory, perceptual reasoning, and inhibitions.

The tasks included finding a phone among a group of images, learning a pattern and reproducing it 30 minutes later, and making a sequence of puzzles increasingly difficult.

The number of students who reported never having used cannabis went from 95.4% in the first year of the study to 71% in the last year.

At the same time, the number of teenagers who reported using marijuana every day has increased five-fold, from 0.37% in the first year to two percent in the fourth year.

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"We were surprised by the lasting effects"

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The study found that adolescents who used cannabis were more often the poor performers in cognitive domain tests.

The researchers also found that cannabis use in a given year was related to inhibited inhibitory control and working memory a year later.

"We were surprised to find that the effects of cannabis were more pronounced than those of alcohol," Dr. Patricia Conrod, author and investigator of the Department of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal told Daily Mail Online.

"And we were surprised lasting effects. Even if a young person reduced his use, you could still see the effects of the previous year. It was more than we expected.

Teens are also worried about vaping cannabis after a report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that last month, e-cigarettes were used to conceal marijuana.

The report revealed that a third of high school students and a quarter of college students had used electronic cigarettes for cannabis in 2016.

A study conducted in 2017 by the Université de Montréal also revealed that adolescents who smoked marijuana at the age of 14 were less successful at the age of 20 on cognitive tests and dropped out of school. the school at a much higher rate than non-smokers.

Another study from Concordia University, also located in Montreal, found that teenagers who smoked marijuana at age 15 or younger suffered from cognitive development and even respiratory illnesses.

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Dr. Conrod said she and her team would like to answer many questions in their future research.

"In the context of recreational cannabis use in adults, when the brain is not maturing, we want to see that they are just as vulnerable to the effects of cannabis," she said. .

"We also want to see if there is a difference in sensitivity between men and women and what brain mechanisms underlie this effect."

C & # 39; where it's legal to smoke cannabis around the world now.

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