Although marijuana does not shrink any parts of the brain, a new study released on Wednesday shows something else; people who smoke pot evidently have smaller brains before so. Another study shows that marijuana puts younger people at higher risk of schizophrenia. Both of these studies – released in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Psychiatry – do not state much according to Dr. David Goldman from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Goldman wrote a commentary on the report and told NBC News, ”It’s probably more a story of what we don’t know than what we do know.”
He made it clear that he was not in any way declaring marijuana to be safe. David Pagliaccio, formerly of Washington University in St. Louis and now at the National Institute of Mental Health, conducted the first experiment. He and his colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging to compare the brains of those who smoke marijuana to the brains of those who do not. To prove that these results were not based off of genetics, two siblings – one who used marijuana and one who didn’t – were also tested.
Upon observing all 482 volunteers, it was evident that the pot smokers had some shrinkage in two brain regions. These parts are called the amygdala and the right ventral striatum. However, when the brains of the marijuana users were compared to their siblings, the differences were practically unobservable. Therefore, it may be possible that those who have smaller regions of the brain already have smaller regions.
“It’s not clear why,” Goldman said. “It could be nutrition, it could be stress exposures, it could be a lot of different things.”
