- Jul 16, 2001
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If you can't remember the headline of this article or are already struggling to recall some of the words at the beginning of the story, try hard to recall how much pot you smoked in your youth.
A new study finds those who've used a lot of marijuana have worse memories and don't think as quickly.
It's not the first study to suggest pot hurts memory, but the findings are stark.
In one memory test, long-time uses remembered seven of 15 words, on average. Non-users remembered 12 of 15. On a decision-making test, those who had rarely smoked pot had impaired performance 8 percent of time, while long-term tokers had 70 percent impairment.
The results are detailed in the March 14 issue of the journal Neurology.
The study involved 64 people age 17 to 49 selected from a larger study group. They were split into three groups: those who had smoked four or more joints per week for more than 10 years; those who'd been smoking for five to 10 years; and those who had smoked at least once but not more than 20 times and not at all in the past two years.
The middle group consistently scored in between the other two.
"We found that the longer people used marijuana, the more deterioration they had in these cognitive abilities, especially in the ability to learn and remember new information," said Lambros Messinis of the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital of Patras in Patras, Greece.
If you can't remember the headline of this article or are already struggling to recall some of the words at the beginning of the story, try hard to recall how much pot you smoked in your youth.
A new study finds those who've used a lot of marijuana have worse memories and don't think as quickly.
It's not the first study to suggest pot hurts memory, but the findings are stark.
In one memory test, long-time uses remembered seven of 15 words, on average. Non-users remembered 12 of 15. On a decision-making test, those who had rarely smoked pot had impaired performance 8 percent of time, while long-term tokers had 70 percent impairment.
The results are detailed in the March 14 issue of the journal Neurology.
The study involved 64 people age 17 to 49 selected from a larger study group. They were split into three groups: those who had smoked four or more joints per week for more than 10 years; those who'd been smoking for five to 10 years; and those who had smoked at least once but not more than 20 times and not at all in the past two years.
The middle group consistently scored in between the other two.
"We found that the longer people used marijuana, the more deterioration they had in these cognitive abilities, especially in the ability to learn and remember new information," said Lambros Messinis of the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital of Patras in Patras, Greece.
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