When you light up or down an edible, you may be lowering your risk of cognitive decline, according to a new study comparing recreational cannabis users to nonusers. As marijuana isn’t without its health harms, these findings came as a surprise even to the scientists behind the study.
Researchers at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University found that nonmedical cannabis use—regardless of how or how often it was consumed—lowered a person’s odds of subjective cognitive decline (SCD) by 96%. The results were published in February in the journal Current Alzheimer Research.
“I was expecting cannabis to be linked to an increased risk for cognitive decline, because that’s pretty much what’s consistent in previous research,” study coauthor Roger Wong, Ph.D., an assistant professor of public health and preventive medicine at the university’s Norton College of Medicine, tells Fortune. “I was stunned by the opposite finding.”
Dual use of cannabis, for both medical and nonmedical purposes, as well as medical use alone also correlated to decreased risk of SCD, the self-reported worsening or increased frequency of confusion or memory loss. However, those associations weren’t statistically significant.
Previous research suggests people with SCD are 2.5 times more likely to develop dementia and 1.8 times more likely to develop mild cognitive impairment. About one in nine U.S. adults ages 45 and older experience SCD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We don’t have a way to prevent dementia right now,” Wong says. “But if we can prevent subjective cognitive decline at the very beginning and track it, that’ll hopefully fix some of the issues that we’re having right now with dementia later in life.”
Hellbound and Down 