Marijuana can improve Vision, says Study

Posted by Sagar Satapathy on November 20, 2015.

A new study has revealed that recreational marijuana can improve the vision of children in the womb. Children exposed to marijuana were 50% better at the global motion task than children who were not, according to the study conducted by scientists at the University of Auckland. Global motion task is about detecting movement of signal dots against the background noise of other dots.

The study was conducted on 145 four-and-half year old kids who were exposed to various forms of methamphetamine, alcohol, nicotine and marijuana before birth and 25 unexposed children. It was found that when mothers took alcohol, their children's motion perception was impaired, but when they consumed both marijuana and alcohol, there was no effect. That came as a big surprise to the scientists.

"Prenatal exposure to methamphetamine had no influence on vision", the study confirmed. While 81.3% of the children were exposed to multiple drugs, 15% had no drug exposure. The study was published on Nature: Scientific Reports.

The children studied by the scientists, comprised of 52 percent European, 36.5 percent Maori, and 11 percent from other ethnicities. The range of drugs they were exposed to was - nicotine 75.2 percent, alcohol 56.4 percent, methamphetamine 44.2 percent and marijuana 40 percent.

Participants from the IDEAL study (2014) were recruited into two groups and data collected from the mothers. Meconium samples were collected from their babies soon after birth for a drug metabolite analysis.

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