Cannabis reverses aging processes in the brains of mice | Hacker News Reader

Cannabis reverses aging processes in the brains of mice

medicalxpress.com

24 pointssethbannon12 comments

It also significantly increases the risk of Schizophrenia. Joy.

http://nationalacademies.org/hmd/reports/2017/health-effects...

Why have rates of schizophrenia stayed flat while cannabis use has increased, if cannabis is causal in schizophrenia?

Not OP, but I can't seem to find any statistic on schizophrenia diagnosis rate to support or refute your claim. I'd be curious to know if you had anything you could link.

I did find an abstract on early onset schizophrenia diagnosis increase, but this doesn't really mean too much (e.g. can mean earlier detection rate or an actual increase of schizophrenia, etc.). [1]

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0447....

Interestingly, this appears to be partly the result of having bred cannabis to have a very high THC content, while CBD shows some anti-psychotic effect[1]

1: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/16/new-strain-c...

If you actually read the science around this, it's been shown that cannabis use clearly does not increase the overall incidence of schizophrenia in a population. It can be a trigger for those already susceptible to developing it, but so can any other sufficiently stressful life experience. This is just another anti-drug myth.

Any sources, i am not trying to call you out but would like to read any hard science on this. Also just because cannabis might not be the super drug everyone wants it to be doesn't mean its anti-drug.

There was a large scale, long duration study which followed thousands of participants and found that the incidence of mental illness, including schizophrenia, in marijuana users was not higher than that in non-user populations. I'll see if I can dig up the study.

EDIT: The paper I am referring to is http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... Also, it's not like I don't acknowledge the positive effects of cannabis. Just seems like it's best to discuss both the pros and cons of the drug, especially if the conclusions from different researches seem confounding.

I thought it was ~proven~ (EDIT: suggested) to lower IQ and the size of the brain for adults with regular use? It seems like the research is very much unclear.

You took a single study that showed an association and called it "proven". It hasn't been proven.

Isn't that temporary?

Presumably if it actually "reduces" aging then in order to have a net neutral (or negative) effect aging would have to accelerate.

If r is the rate of aging, t is time and x is the amount cannabis decreases aging the following is always true for positive values of x:

  (t - x) * r < t * r

only if you stop smoking? :)

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