14 DAY TRIAL // Adolescents who smoke marijuana on a regular basis risk developing brain abnormalities that can eventually lead to the onset of schizophrenia and other similar psychiatric disorders, researchers explain.
Writing in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, a team of University of Maryland scientists argue that, according to their investigations, regular marijuana consumption affects adolescents more than it does adults.
The researchers are not saying that marijuana in itself causes these adolescents to develop serious psychiatric disorders in later life.
What they mean is that, in the case of people who already have a genetic predisposition for psychiatric disorders, the drug can act like a trigger and increase the odds that the condition will manifest itself.
“There likely is a genetic susceptibility, and then you add marijuana during adolescence and it becomes the trigger,” specialist Asaf Keller argues, as cited by Science Daily.
“Adolescence is the critical period during which marijuana use can be damaging,” he adds.
Experiments on mice have shown that young rodents exposed to fairly small doses of the active ingredient in marijuana for 20 days in a row displayed abnormal patterns of brain activity throughout the rest of their lives.
“In the adult mice exposed to marijuana ingredients in adolescence, we found that cortical oscillations [i.e. patterns of neuronal activity] were grossly altered, and they exhibited impaired cognitive abilities. We also found impaired cognitive behavioral performance in those mice.
“The striking finding is that, even though the mice were exposed to very low drug doses, and only for a brief period during adolescence, their brain abnormalities persisted into adulthood,” Sylvina Mullins Raver details.
Oddly enough, adult mice exposed to the drug were not in any way affected by it, meaning that their brains did not develop any abnormalities.
The researchers stress that, as several states in the US are looking into the possibility of legalizing marijuana consumption, it is important that the scientists community thoroughly investigates the health risks associated with this drug.