Pot Makes Older People Smarter? Well, Older Mice, Anyway

Most people might think of a typical pot smoker as a young, confused and maybe a bit slow mentally. According to some recent research, the opposite may be true for older people.

Nature Medicine published new research that showed that pot seemed to improve cognitive performance in older mice and the opposite in younger mice.

The younger mice had a more difficult time learning and remembering things.

"For example, after receiving THC, young mice took longer to learn where a safe platform was hidden in a water maze, and they had a harder time recognizing another mouse to which they had previously been exposed," ScientificAmerican.com reported.

"The effects were very robust, very profound," said lead researchers Andreas Zimmer of the University of Bonn in Germany.

Will, this work the same on older humans?  Researcher are cautious not to go quite that far yet.

"This well-designed set of experiments shows that chronic THC pretreatment appears to restore a significant level of diminished cognitive performance in older mice, while corroborating the opposite effect among young mice," wrote Susan Weiss, director of the Division of Extramural Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse wrote in an email to ScientificAmerican.com. "While it would be tempting to presume the relevance of these findings [extends] to aging humans ... further research will be critically needed."

(Fox 35 Orlando)