Schizophrenia Research Cognition
May 11, 2024
Christopher Dawes, Samuel Joy McGreal, Shivika Marwaha et al.
Aberrant attentional salience has been implicated in the cannabis-psychosis association. Here, history and frequency of cannabis use were examined against changes in overshadowing (OS), a cue competition paradigm that involves salience processing. Additionally, we examined the association between OS and alternative measures of aberrant salience, as well as schizotypy, in a non-clinical adult...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
November 23, 2021
Christopher Dawes, Andrea Bickerdike, Cian O’Neill et al.
3 citations
Cannabis use has been associated with increased risk for a first episode of psychosis and inappropriate assignment of salience to extraneous stimuli has been proposed as a mechanism underlying this association. Psychosis-prone (especially schizotypal) personality traits are associated with deficits in associative learning tasks that measure salience allocation. The aim of this study was to...
Schizophrenia Research
April 6, 2020
Colm O’Tuathaigh, Christopher Dawes, Andrea Bickerdike et al.
13 citations
Cannabis can induce acute psychotic symptoms in healthy individuals and exacerbate pre-existing psychotic symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. Inappropriate salience allocation is hypothesised to be central to the association between dopamine dysregulation and psychotic symptoms. This study examined whether cannabis use is associated with self-reported salience dysfunction and schizotypal...
Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry
July 3, 2014
Colm M P O'Tuathaigh, Ilse Gantois, John L. Waddington
Cannabis use is an established risk factor for the development of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders. Factors that may mediate susceptibility to the psychosis-inducing effects of cannabis include the age at onset of first cannabis use, genetic predisposition, as well as interaction with other environmental risk variables. Clinical and preclinical genetic studies provide increasing...
Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology
October 2010
Colm M P O'Tuathaigh, Magdalena Hryniewiecka, Aine Behan et al.
Cannabis use confers a two-fold increase in the risk for psychosis, with adolescent use conferring even greater risk. A high-low activity catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) polymorphism may modulate the effects of adolescent Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) exposure on the risk for adult psychosis. Mice with knockout of the COMT gene were treated chronically with THC (4.0 and 8.0 mg/kg over 20...