Does This Legalized Drug cause Alzheimer’s Disease?

Many recent studies have indicated that chemical compounds in marijuana are able to reduce our risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

Now, just to remind us that medical science is an ongoing conversation and thereby a work in progress, a new study in the journal Alzheimer’s Disease suggests that marijuana may actually affect the brain in ways that may cause Alzheimer’s disease.

But the real finding wasn’t about Marijuana at all. It may carry the cure for Alzheimer’s.

Scientists from the Amen Clinic did functional neuroimaging scans on the brains of 982 marijuana users and 92 non-users to compare the amount of blood that flows through them both while performing a concentration task and while at rest.

Several areas of the brains of the marijuana users, most notably the hippocampus, showed markedly less blood flow than the brains of the non-users.

The hippocampus is one of the most important parts of your brain. It is responsible for both short-term and long-term memory, and for spatial coding, which refers to your ability to map and remember physical spaces like your home or street or, mind you, the shapes of letters or buttonholes on your clothes. These are the first areas of the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers that start to shrink.

That is why people afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease have such poor memories, become easily disoriented, and need help to dress and feed themselves.

In this new study, the right hippocampus suffered the worst reduction in blood flow.

Interestingly, many of the study participants were former marijuana smokers who had given it up years before the brain scans. In other words, if these researchers are right, marijuana does permanent damage to cerebral blood flow that does not reverse when you stop smoking it.

But the real issue is the blood flow to specific areas of the brain and how to increase that. Our Brain Booster exercises, found here, are specifically focused on that exact task…