How can cannabis affect your brain

Cannabis may make symptoms worse or increase the chances of developing the condition in people who have a genetic predisposition. When you come down from the high, you may feel tired or a bit depressed.

In some people, cannabis can cause anxiety. Using cannabis during pregnancy can also affect the developing baby. The child may have trouble with memory, concentration, and problem-solving skills. As mentioned earlier, federal prohibition has made research into the effects of cannabis largely observational, which can only detect correlation and not causation. Cannabis can cause digestive issues when taken orally.

While THC has been shown to ease nausea and vomiting, in some people long-term heavy use can paradoxically cause nausea and vomiting. This can be a benefit for people who need to gain weight or increase appetite, such as people with cancer receiving chemotherapy. Studies involving animals have shown that THC may adversely affect the immune system by suppressing it.

This could theoretically make you more susceptible to infectious diseases. However, for people with autoimmune conditions who have an overactive immune system, this may be a benefit.

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Cannabinoids exert their influence by regulating how cells communicate—how they send, receive, or process messages. When someone smokes marijuana, THC gets into the brain rapidly and attaches to cannabinoid receptors. The natural EC system is finely tuned to react appropriately to incoming information. In the study, researchers wanted to see whether the brains of 59 chronic marijuana users would respond differently to the photos of objects used for smoking marijuana than they did to the photos of objects that are considered "natural rewards," such as their favorite fruits.

The scientists found that study participants who had smoked marijuana for 12 years, on average, exhibited greater activity in the brain's reward system when they looked at photos of objects that they used for smoking marijuana such as a pipe or a joint than when they looked at photos of their favorite fruits. In comparison, the people in the control group who did not smoke marijuana did not show greater activity in this brain region when they were shown marijuana-related objects, according to the findings, published in May in the journal Human Brain Mapping.

Francesca Filbey, an associate professor of behavioral and brain science at the University of Texas at Dallas, said in a statement. THC —marijuana's main psychoactive compound —may increase the level of " neural noise, "or random neural activity in the brain, research suggests. In a study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, researchers measured the levels of this random neural activity in 24 people under two conditions: after they had been given pure THC, and after they had been given a placebo.

They found that the people showed greater levels of neural noise after they received the THC, compared with their levels after they took the placebo. The findings suggest that psychosis-like symptoms that people may experience after smoking weed may be related to this neural noise, the researchers said.

Marijuana may affect certain neurons in the brain that are normally responsible for suppressing appetite, and this effect may explain why people often get very hungry after smoking pot, according to a study in mice. In the study, researchers stimulated the mice's appetites by manipulating the same cellular pathway as the one that mediates pot's effects on the brain, and then observed what was going on in the mice's brains during the experiment. The effect was sizable and significant even after eliminating those involved with current use and after adjusting for confounding factors such as demographic factors, other drug and alcohol use, and other psychiatric conditions such as depression.

Some studies have also linked marijuana use to declines in IQ, especially when use starts in adolescence and leads to persistent cannabis use disorder into adulthood.

However, not all of the studies on the link between marijuana and IQ have reached the same conclusion, and it is difficult to prove that marijuana causes a decline in IQ when there are multiple factors that can influence the results of such studies, such as genetics, family environment, age of first use, frequency of use, having a cannabis use disorder, duration of use, and duration of the study.

Key research in this area to date is described below. A large longitudinal study in New Zealand found that persistent marijuana use disorder with frequent use starting in adolescence was associated with a loss of an average of 6 or up to 8 IQ points measured in mid-adulthood.

People who only began using marijuana heavily in adulthood did not lose IQ points. Also, no predictable difference was found between twins when one used marijuana and one did not.