The more teenagers delay smoking marijuana until they’re
older, the better it is for their brains, but there may be little ill
effect if they start after age 17, says a new Université de Montréal
study.
Adolescents who smoke pot as early as 14 do worse by 20 on some
cognitive tests and drop out of school at a higher rate than
non-smokers, confirms the study, published Dec. 29 in Development and
Psychopathology, a Cambridge University Press journal.
“Overall, these results suggest that, in addition to academic
failure, fundamental life skills necessary for problem-solving and daily
adaptation […] may be affected by early cannabis exposure,” the study
says.
However, the cognitive declines associated with cannabis do not seem
to be global or widespread, cautioned the study’s lead author, Natalie
Castellanos-Ryan, an assistant professor at UdeM’s School of
Psychoeducation.
Her study found links between cannabis use and brain impairment only
in the areas of verbal IQ and specific cognitive abilities related to
frontal parts of the brain, particularly those that require learning by
trial-and-error.
In addition, if teenagers hold off until age 17 before smoking their
first joint, those impairments are no longer discernible. “We found that
adolescents who started using cannabis at 17 or older performed equally
well as adolescents who did not use cannabis,” said Castellanos-Ryan.
Natalie Castellanos-Ryan, Jean-Baptiste Pingault, Sophie Parent, Frank Vitaro, Richard E. Tremblay, Jean R. Séguin. Adolescent
cannabis use, change in neurocognitive function, and high-school
graduation: A longitudinal study from early adolescence to young
adulthood. Development and Psychopathology, 2016; 1 DOI: 10.1017/S0954579416001280
WELL i was going to say shes my favorite but it turns out ive been getting her and light heart mixed up literally my whole life until just now (shes very very cute)
the one thing i didn’t get about scooby doo is how there was an entire line of pet treats that were exclusively marketed to one dog and his owner who ate dog treats too for some reason
Melibe viridis, a species of nudibranch/sea slug! I have some more videos of them in my tags. The weird net thing is an ‘oral veil’, which they use to sift through the sea floor and capture small creatures to eat.
