Marijuana Affects The Index IQ

Marijuana Affects The Index IQ.
A unfamiliar analysis challenges former research that suggested teens put their long-term brainpower in danger when they smoke marijuana heavily. Instead, the study 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 say 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 inaugural study responded to a solicit 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 nature professors at Duke University, while Meier is a postdoctoral allied there.

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

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