Marijuana Affects The Index IQ

Marijuana Affects The Index IQ.
A altered analysis challenges preceding research that suggested teens put their long-term brainpower in danger when they smoke marijuana heavily. Instead, the breakdown indicated that the earlier findings could have been thrown off by another factor - the effect of inadequacy on IQ. The author of the new analysis, Ole Rogeberg, cautioned that his theory may not hold much water. "Or, it may revolution out that it explains a lot," said Rogeberg, a research economist at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Oslo, Norway.

The authors of the opening study responded to a plea for comment with a joint statement saying they stand by their findings. "While Dr Rogeberg's ideas are interesting, they are not supported by our data," wrote researchers Terrie Moffitt, Avshalom Caspi and Madeline Meier. Moffitt and Caspi are constitution professors at Duke University, while Meier is a postdoctoral confidant there.

Their study, published in August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, attracted media notice because it suggested that smoking cook-pot has more than short-term effects on how people think. Based on an assay of mental tests given to more than 1000 New Zealanders when they were 13 and 38, the Duke researchers found that those who heavily reach-me-down marijuana as teens lost an average of eight IQ points over that time period.

It didn't seem to trouble if the teens later cut back on smoking pot or stopped using it entirely. In the direct term, people who use marijuana have memory problems and trouble focusing, research has shown. So, why wouldn't users have problems for years?

So "The give reminds me of something adults affirm when kids make weird faces: 'Careful, or your face will stay that way,'" Rogeberg said. "It is certainly conceivable that in the long term, heavy cannabis use has permanent or firm effects on the brain. But to find out what these changes are and what they mean is not easy. We can't just expression at the short-term effects and assume that these gradually become fixed and permanent over time".

In his report, Rogeberg employed simulation computer modeling to argue that the initial study was possibly flawed because of the effects of shortage on IQ. "Recent research indicates that IQ and brainpower are kind of like muscular strength: strengthened if it is regularly challenged. IQ is strengthened or prolonged by taking education, studying hard, spending interval with smart, challenging people, doing demanding work in our jobs. Some kids, unfortunately, are burdened with a meagre home environment, poor self-control and conduct problems.

These kids are able to gradually shift away from the kinds of activities and environments that would exercise their IQs". Rogeberg, whose report appears in this week's online number of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that the initial con didn't properly take this into account. "Although it would be too strong to say that the results have been discredited, the methodology is tainted and the causal inference drawn from the results premature".

In their response, the Duke researchers said that only 23 percent of the subjects they studied were from poor families, making it unlikely that these participants threw off the overall results. And their results were the same when they only focused on men and women from middle-class families. The Duke group also noted that another group shows similar results from marijuana exposure: rats vigrx box. And, as they unmistakable out, rats don't go to school or fall into rich, middle-class or poor categories.