Cannabis May Revitalize Elderly Brains And Help Fight Dementia

There are so many separated opinions regarding marijuana, is it medical, is it a hoax, is it just another trying-to-be medical scam, does it have multiple benefits, or maybe it’s just the consumers who like to promote marijuana to ease the way to find it and buy it, we wouldn’t truly know. The internet is overflowing with different beliefs about it, each to their own, but we would first like to examine and make a small study of this many- beloved plant, and show some facts that are more reliable.

There are new researches that imply the benefits of the marijuana, and the brain is the organ that’s mainly examined. It showed that there is a connection between the vitality of the brain function and it may give an insight on how to treat dementia.

This new study was led by Andreas Zimmer from Germany’s University of Bonn. The research, which was recently published in the journal Nature Medicine, reveals the impacts of marijuana on the elderly mouse brain. According to the research, THC might help reverse the aging of the elderly brain and fight dementia.

The experiment of the researchers includes mice aged 2 months, 12 months, and 18 months old, and they gave THC to the selected group of mice. Shortly, the average lifespan of a mouse is 2 years, so those mice that are 18 months are considered old.

The amount of THC given to the mice was relatively small, so they didn’t get high as the way as we know it. While the young mice had troubles with memory and learning capacities, the elderly mice advanced. In fact, the THC helped them with memory, abilities, just as the capacity of their brain in their most youthful age of living.  The connections between the brain cells became more active and the memory and learning capacities were highly boosted. Signs of brain aging was reversed.

“We repeated these experiments many times,” says Zimmer to New Scientist. “It’s a very robust and profound effect.” These results were discovered by subjecting mice to tests such as complex mazes, and capacity for facial recognition (they faced the mice they’ve met before).

Susan Weiss, director of the Division of Extramural Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse tells Scientific American, to not jump too fast in conclusions. While mice are often used to be lab tested due to their biological and behavior similarities to humans, they are still not humans, and more researches are needed to find out if these benefits truly help brain development on humans. It’s also important to note that unlike CBD—which has become widely popular for medical use due to its lack of psychoactive properties—the cannabinoid used in this study was THC. This means that if the research findings here can be extrapolated and applied to humans, getting “high” will likely be necessary to reap these potential benefits.

But still the study’s findings are remarkable. As Scientific American writes, the result of dispensing THC to elderly mice was that “neurons in the hippocampus—a brain area critical for learning and memory—had sprouted more synaptic spines, the points of contact for communication between neurons.” “It’s a quite striking finding,” Says Zimmer to New Scientist.

It’s a quite interesting experience to witness how one’s mind can become forgetful when it’s the peak of their youthful years and those of the elder’s become way more active. It’s for our best to find more ways for helping patients with dementia, or other brain diseases that we couldn’t find medication for treatment. Hopefully there will be more researches that can confirm and explore ways for such as medications and treatments, and we would be more than happy to share them with you.