Association between cannabis use and subjective cognitive decline
eurekaselect.com
eurekaselect.com
1) Weed dramatically reduces cognitive impairment.
2) Weed dramatically reduces an individual's ability to accurately asses their cognitive ability.
3) People who use weed are, for some other reason, dramatically less likely to suffer from cognitive impairment, or dramatically less able to accurately evaluate their own cognitive state.
4) The study itself is biased or flawed somehow.
As a daily smoker (for over two decades), I definitely seek BOTH states of mind.
Regardless, glad to see you've remained fascinated with your career.
Afaik CBD counteracts the mind infatuation but leaves the body high on.
ask someone who take drugs to assess their own capacities, instead of measuring those from an objective perspective.
Obviously, "yes cannabis affects your ability to self-report your cognitive abilities";
it's a psychoactive drug that is mainly used for its cognitive effects, it's the main use/"advantage" of it ! (more rarely for pain management)
It's like if you ask alkaloidal cocaine (crack) users how they feel about their abilities.
They may report amazing bodily control enhancement, and seen from the outside it may be very different.
Even alcohol users, at the exit of night clubs, you sometimes see them report self-report increased abilities and decide to drive.
In that case, asking them to self-report doesn't give you much info on their actual abilities.
All signal, no noise. Entire disciplines would be absent from it
It would appear that many researchers are aware the system is suboptimal but are resigned to it, or even benefit from it.
Maybe we should pitch a tech billionaire to fund a journal like this.
One thing I've noticed with pot smokers is that many seem to be almost in love with the drug. I have had people try to explain to me the manifold benefits of hemp fibers or CBD or how cannabis kills cancers. I think this could quite plausibly extend to survey answers, where saying they suffer from cognitive decline would be a kind of admission of defeat and go against their core beliefs of cannabis as purely positive godly thing.
So basically some kind of psycho-cultural defense mechanism?
It's always a game of social influence at the beginning, and sometimes later on.
Eventually, you may be pushed to smoke if you want to feel part of a social group and culture, and then, once inside, you have to follow the codes of it.
A large part of the cannabis cult(ure) is to preach the substance to everybody around you, to get it depenalized, legalized, and want everybody to have good views on it so they can take it more in public, and be socially more accepted, not considered like a junkie.
The end-game of it, is to do everything to get more of it, consciously or not.
Then, from that perspective, now you have someone that asks you: "is cannabis good for you ?" (just in other words).
Your goal to consume cheaper and higher quality of the substance, without legal risks, and to have approval of your friends, then what do you say ?
Of course "yes it's great".
There is also a survivorship bias in the study: once you feel that your cognitive abilities decline, you typically stop smoking cannabis.
The extreme case: people with dementia are automatically excluded because they cannot even smoke or purchase the product.
“The reason for cannabis use, but not frequency and method, is associated with SCD.”
The finding is clearly an artifact of the methodology. BRFSS is probably not the right way to study this.
Most adults are busy reducing brain cell count thru use of alcohol and other poisons. Marijuana on the other hand is proven to increase brain cell count thru neurogenesis in the hippocampus [1].
This is not possible for adults without marijuana [2].
EX: https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/44/2/zsaa173/5986548
However, growing evidence suggests that new cells are not only “born” constitutively in the adult hypothalamus, but many of these cells also differentiate into neurons and glia and serve specific functions.
1. The decline (which is reported to be less frequent in cannabis users) is self-reported subjective cognitive decline based on users’ experience.
2. I think that one of the hallmarks of cannabis use is an immediate decline in short-term memory. I believe this usually reverses itself after some time (hours or days).
3. I have used a lot of cannabis in the past. I stopped entirely - for now - for quite some time and I think my mental acuity is currently at its peak over my lifetime and may be growing.
4. Not only is cannabis a very highly cultivated plant whose potency has been increasing a lot for decades (citation needed), there are a ton of cannabis-derived products out there today that have just a ton of THC, way more than one could get by smoking even the highest potency bud. I think this has prohably changed the game entirely. I used a few of them and I would absolutely recommend caution, far beyond the legitimate caution I would recommend for even smoking cannabis bud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACfNSqsi_mE
Probably your last point is key. Even a little dab will do ya nowadays or you'll forget what I was talking about. Wait.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8116407
Although most recreational cannabis is high THC : low CBD, there is ever-growing demand for more balanced strains. There's no telling what the average looks like in black and grey markets (although high THC is certainly the default assumption given its intoxicating effects). Before we make blanket statements about the impact of cannabis on sleep, we should probably seek to answer questions like, what is the overall impact on REM sleep with cannabis that has a 4:1 ratio of THC to CBD or lower?
I don't think there's reason to expect any relation between REM sleep and the outcome to hold.
Basically pot makes you less self-aware.
Which is exactly the effect some people are seeking with it.
That is one interpretation, yes. But not the only possible one.
Is it good? Maybe. Maybe not good but neutral. Maybe actually bad. More research is needed.
So those that get stoned are more confident in their mind's ability than those that don't?
Was I sharper a few years ago? Maybe, I really couldn’t tell you, and it’s not like I’ve been taking cognitive evaluations to check.
Scary thoughts.
> Compared to non-users, non-medical cannabis use was significantly associated with 96% decreased odds of SCD (aOR=0.04, 95% CI=0.01-0.44, p<.01). Medical (aOR=0.46, 95% CI=0.06-3.61, p=.46) and dual medical and non-medical use (aOR=0.30, 95% CI=0.03-2.92, p=.30) were also associated with decreased odds of SCD, although not significant.
I'm not a native speaker but if non-medical use of cannabis has a different outcome than medical and mixed use than it seems plausible that there are other - more important - factors at play or do I misunderstand the paragraph?
Lower odds is seemingly a good thing (if you’re somebody that enjoys retaining memory)