CBD vaping may lead to improvements in verbal recall – study

A study on CBD vaping has revealed it may be associated with short-term improvements in how we recall words.

The researchers took the effects of vaporised CBD and compared them to placebo on verbal episodic memory performance in a group of 34 young adult participants aged 18 to 30.

The study took place on two study days at the University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland and findings were published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

The participants were also monitored in terms of relaxation, fatigue, motivation and mood, as well as headaches and how well they tolerated the vaping.

After the patients were given words to learn and immediately recall, they were then asked to vape for approximately 15 minutes under supervision. They were then given an n-back task which is a continuous performance task commonly used in psychology to measure their working memory and memory capacity. Twenty minutes after learning, the patients sat a word recall test to assess episodic memory performance.

Vaping study results

The results showed that those consuming CBD exhibited better verbal recall than those given the placebo. Researchers noted that there was an average increase of recalled words 20 minutes after vaping CBD compared to the placebo by 10 percent. Although they highlighted that further studies on dosage were needed, it was agreed that CBD showed possible therapeutic promise.

The authors wrote: “The present study revealed an average increase of recalled words 20 minutes after vaping CBD compared to placebo condition by 10 percent. Importantly, we did not detect medication effects on attention or working memory performance, suggesting that CBD has no negative impact on these basic cognitive functions.”

They added: “CBD might prove useful to enhance disease-related memory impairments being present in psychiatric disorders, neurodegenerative disorders, as well as in stress and stress-related exhaustion related to episodic memory deficits.

“While further research is needed to identify dose-response and time-response relationships, our results show that CBD can improve episodic memory, a drug effect with possible therapeutic potential.”

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