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Daily Marijuana Use And Highly Potent Weed Linked To Psychosis
Weed use is taking off as more states move to legalize it. And with all the buzz over medical marijuana, it's starting to gain an aura of healthfulness. But there are some serious health risks associated with frequent use. One of the more troubling ones is the risk of having a psychotic episode.
Several past studies have found that more frequent use of pot is associated with a higher risk of psychosis, that is, when someone loses touch with reality. Now a new study published Tuesday [open, DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(19)30048-3] [DX] in the The Lancet Psychiatry shows that consuming pot on a daily basis and especially using high potency cannabis increases the odds of having a psychotic episode later.
[...] The study also shows that three European cities — London, Paris and Amsterdam — where high potency weed is most commonly available actually have higher rates of new cases of psychosis than the other cities in the study. [...] The researchers identified 901 people aged 18 to 64 who were diagnosed with their first episode of psychosis between May 2010 and April 2015, at a mental health facility anywhere in 11 cities, including London, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, other cities across Europe, and one site in Brazil.
The researchers then asked these individuals and a control group of 1,200-plus other healthy people about their habits, including their use of weed. "We asked people if they used cannabis, when did they start using it and what kind of cannabis," explains study author Marta Di Forti, a psychiatrist and clinician scientist at King's College London. People reported the names of weed strains they used, like skunk in the U.K., or the Dutch Nederwiet, which allowed the researchers to identify the THC content in each product through data gathered by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction and national data from the different countries.
The study found that those who used pot daily were three times more likely to have a psychotic episode compared to someone who never used the drug.
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(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday March 20 2019, @05:18PM (9 children)
That said, the results are certainly interesting. I wonder how that correlation compares to the one with prescription "anti-psychotics."
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 20 2019, @09:11PM (8 children)
"Of course not" he said without bothering to read the methodological approaches the study actually made to attempt* to control for that. After all his ideological perspective was that all demonization of previously illegal drugs had to come from a totally irrational perspective. No way it could be justifiable to be legal with side effects continuing to exist.
For reference, here's the things they did to specifically try to limit the extent to which that could be true
1. Patients were excluded if they had been previously treated for psychosis or if they met criteria for organic psychosis (F09) or for psychotic symptoms resulting from acute intoxication (F1X.5).
2. We used complete case analyses for all analyses using Stata version 14. We used inverse probability weights to account for any oversampling of controls relative to the populations at risk (appendix); we gave each control's data a weight inversely proportional to their probability of selection given their key demographics (age, gender, and ethnicity) using census data on relevant populations. These weights were applied in all analyses.
3. Stimulants, hallucinogens, ketamine, and novel psychoactive substances (so-called legal highs; never tried vs ever tried); and mean number of alcoholic drinks consumed daily on an average week. All sociodemographic and drug-use variables associated with case-control status were controlled for in all analyses
4. The STATA punafcc command was used to calculate the population attributable fraction (PAF) with 95% CIs for the two cannabis use measures that carried the largest adjusted OR for psychosis. The PAF measures the population effect of an exposure by providing an estimate of the proportion of disorder that would be prevented if the exposure were removed, assuming causality.
5. Find a dose-response curve
Now, because this was epidemological, not experimental in design, none of that excludes the possibility that there are recurrent trends of self medication that
A. Don't result in any diagnosis
B. Smoothly cross demographic boundaries
C. Only correlate to pot self-medication, but not other drugs, including common ones like alcohol and cigarettes
and
D. Increase their own self medication levels to deal with the increased symptoms
But, don't you want to take 10 minutes to maybe read the study methodology, and decide whether a possible 500% increase (relative risk) in psychotic events is worth examining in further detail before announcing your conclusions?
Maybe?
Just possibly consider the analysis in a little detail?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 20 2019, @09:33PM (6 children)
Saying that they controlled for that doesn't mean they actually did.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 20 2019, @09:42PM (5 children)
Thank you for your giant working brain.
The ability to see past all the relevant details, context, and analysis, whisk right through that muddy difficulty to arrive at the perfect, clear, big-picture conclusion of what you believed already. We could be in the muddy weeds of "well, this methodological approach can hide this phenomenon by this poorly understood mechanism" or god help us complimentary and contradictory studies. But thanks to you, we can arrive at the glorious truth of "restate premise without context".
Where would we all be without your stunning insight. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 20 2019, @09:52PM (4 children)
If they're present, that is and working as advertised. I notice that there's a lot of handwaving in your post for its supposed scienciness.
What you could have instead wrote was "Here's how they said they addressed that issue..." It indicates to me that you didn't read the research you claim to know something about.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 20 2019, @11:23PM (3 children)
My post literally contained 5 relevant direct excerpts, what the fuck is wrong with you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 21 2019, @12:23AM
> ...what the fuck is wrong with you?
his nick is khallow, being wrong (and annoying to boot) comes with the territory.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 21 2019, @04:15AM
Only two of which were relevant to Arik's argument. Point 1 was a tangential matter, excluding two classes for reasons which were irrelevant to the discussion of self-medication. Points 2 was merely a procedural issue. Point 3 filtered out the effects of other potential drugs (including alcohol) that might affect the study, but not the effects of self-medication.
Point 4 and 5 combined is a frequentist approach to the problem. It might work correctly, or not. Just saying it's been done doesn't actually tell us whether there are biases or other procedural issues in the study confounding that result. We do know that similar frequentist studies can result in erroneous outcomes and they're not terribly good at determining causality. Notice the use of the term "assuming causality" in point 4. Finally, none of the stuff mentioned actually determines causality. So of your five "relevant direct excerpts, three were not, and the remaining two could be misapplied to get causality in the wrong direction.
I think an interesting question would be asking the marijuana user with psychotic symptoms questions connecting the two, such as whether they use marijuana deliberately to reduce the effects of the psychotic symptoms, and whether use of marijuana helps, in their opinion, with symptoms. In other words, it won't catch someone unconsciously coping with psychosis through marijuana use, but it will catch those who are intentionally doing so and provide something of a sanity check for the research. It is apparently not a rare belief that marijuana can help with psychological issues.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday March 22 2019, @11:53AM
A better question would have been: "how often do you smoke high THC cannabis?".
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday March 21 2019, @08:25AM
A. Don't result in any diagnosis
B. Smoothly cross demographic boundaries
C. Only correlate to pot self-medication, but not other drugs, including common ones like alcohol and cigarettes
and
D. Increase their own self medication levels to deal with the increased symptoms
But, don't you want to take 10 minutes to maybe read the study methodology"
I doubt it took a whole ten minutes, I did it prior to posting, and I saw exactly what I quoted from you above.
Got anything to add?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?