The association between cannabis use and the development of medical and psychiatric disorders, including psychosis and schizophrenia, has been interrogated by epidemiological, laboratory, and genetic methods.[6] However, part of the difficulty in these studies is the complexity of cannabis, which is a mixture of more than 400 different component chemicals – any of which may, in principle, interact with the body to produce an effect.[6] More research is needed to understand the interaction of the different components of cannabis with other risk factors for psychosis.[6]
Reference:
[1] Semple DM, McIntosh AM, Lawrie SM. Cannabis as a risk factor for psychosis: systematic review. J Psychopharmacol 2005; 19 (2): 187–194.
[2] Vaucher J, Keating BJ, Lasserre AM, et al. Cannabis use and risk of schizophrenia: a mendelian randomization study. Mol Psychiatry 2018; 23 (5): 1287–1292.
[3] Ryan JE, Veliz P, McCabe SE, et al. Association of early onset of cannabis, cigarette, other drug use and schizophrenia or psychosis. Schizophr Res 2020; 215: 482–484.
[4] Ferland JN, Hurd YL. Deconstructing the neurobiology of cannabis use disorder. Nat Neurosci 2020; 23 (5): 600–610.
[5] Demontis, D, Rajagopal, VM, Thorgeirsson, TE, et al. Genome-wide association study implicates CHRNA2 in cannabis use disorder. Nat Neurosci 2019; 22 (7): 1066–1074.
[6] Radhakrishnan R, Guloksuz S, D’Souza DC, van Os J. Editorial: Gone to pot: examining the association between cannabis use and medical/psychiatric disorders. Front Psychiatry 2022; 13: 837757.
