The impact of marijuana use on memory in HIV-infected patients: a comprehensive review of the HIV and marijuana literatures.

CONCLUSION: A compensatory hypothesis, based on the cognitive aging literature, is proposed to provide a framework to explore the interaction between marijuana and HIV. There is some evidence that individuals infected with HIV recruit additional brain regions during memory tasks to compensate for HIV-related declines in neurocognitive functioning. Marijuana use causes impairment in similar brain systems, and thus it is hypothesized that the added neural strain of marijuana can exhaust neural resources, resulting in pronounced memory impairment. It will be important to test this hypothesis empirically, and future research priorities are discussed. PMID: 27138170 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Current Drug Abuse Reviews - Category: Addiction Tags: Curr Drug Abuse Rev Source Type: research