Teenagers who use cannabis have a dramatic increased risk for a psychotic disorder compared with their counterparts who don’t use the drug, new research showed.
Investigators at the University of Toronto, The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), in Canada, linked recent population-based survey data from over 11,000 youngsters to health service use records, including hospitalizations, emergency department (ED) visits, and outpatient visits.
“We found a very strong association between cannabis use and risk of psychotic disorder in adolescence [although] surprisingly, we didn’t find evidence of association in young adulthood,” lead author André J. McDonald, PhD, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Peter Boris Centre for Addictions Research and the Michael G. DeGroote Centre for Medicinal Cannabis Research, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, said in a news release.