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Our guest this week is Dr. Staci Gruber, Director of the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Core at McLean Hospital’s Brain Imaging Center and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Gruber has spent decades investigating how both recreational and medical cannabis use affects the brain. In 2014, Dr. Gruber launched Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND), the first-ever program of its kind designed to clarify the specific effects of medical cannabis use.
What she and her team have found is that not only do medical cannabis patients tend to perform better on cognitive tests when compared to recreational users, but medical cannabis patients tend to outperform themselves when compared to tests administered before they started treatment.
Staci and explores why this is the case in the podcast, as well as results from MIND’s double-blind, placebo-controlled CBD clinical trial for anxiety, which used a high-CBD whole-plant extract. Interesting observations from the study include:
- Patients’ performance on cognitive tests improved after starting treatment
- Patients reported using smaller doses of the whole-plant extract than patients in trials using single-compound therapeutics
- Some patients still tested positive for THC despite the fact that the hemp-derived extract contained less than .3mg/mL of THC.
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