Overview
Researchers at UT Dallas recently published a new study published in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse has found that adult participants with cannabis use disorder often experienced poorer sleep than participants who were not regular cannabis users, based upon assessments of visuospatial memory.Led by BrainHealth principal investigator Francesca Filbey, PhD, in collaboration with researchers in the Netherlands, the study marks the first formal investigation into marijuana’s effect on both memory and sleep.“”
"Memory has been widely known to be a potential impairment as a result of cannabis use, but we don’t know yet what the mechanisms are. We especially don’t know how that relates to people who use cannabis as a sleep aid."
– Francesca Filbey, PhD, Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of Addictive Disorders
UTD doctoral student and study author Tracy Brown surveyed more than 200 people from Dallas and the Netherlands about recent experiences with sleep quality, including 141 respondents with cannabis use disorder (CUD) and 87 who had not used marijuana within the past three months. In addition to reporting a greater magnitude of sleep problems, the CUD group also demonstrated lower level performance on tests assessing visuospatial memory, or the ability to retain and process information about an object’s appearance and location.According to researchers outside of the study, these findings are helping connect the dots and deepen research into the connection between cannabis and sleep, and how these this interaction may influence memory.“”
"What this paper does is provide a bridge between the two things and helps establish that perhaps some of the memory impairment associated with cannabis use is indeed due to poor sleep quality."
– Christopher Verrico, Associate Professor of Psychiatry Research at Baylor College of Medicine
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