Substance AbuseOctober 1, 2015Kara S. Bagot, Robert Milin, Yifrah Kaminer
Background: It is important to evaluate the impact of cannabis use on onset and course of psychotic illness, as the increasing number of novice cannabis users may translate into a greater public health burden. This study aims to examine the relationship between adolescent onset of regular marijuana use and age of onset of prodromal symptoms, or first episode psychosis, and the manifestation of...
Neurobiology of DiseaseOctober 2015Michael D Ballinger, Atsushi Saito, Bagrat Abazyan et al.
Cannabis is an increasingly popular and controversial drug used worldwide. Cannabis use often begins during adolescence, a highly susceptible period for environmental stimuli to alter functional and structural organization of the developing brain. Given that adolescence is a critical time for the emergence of mental illnesses before full-onset in early adulthood, it is particularly important to...
Marijuana produces acute increases in positive subjective effects and decreased reactivity to negative affective stimuli, though may also acutely induce anxiety. Implicit attentional and evaluative processes may explicate marijuana's ability to acutely increase positive and negative emotions. This within-subjects study examined whether smoked marijuana with 2.7-3.0% delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol...
A 17-year-old male with a history of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was brought by the police to the emergency room from his school for bizarre behavior. According to the reports, the patient had been observed talking to himself during class, laughing inappropriately, and making odd statements. The patient initially denied illicit substance use, and his urine toxicology and...
OBJECTIVE: The authors conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of ketamine and other N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonists in the treatment of major depression. METHOD: Searches of MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and other databases were conducted for placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical trials of NMDA antagonists in the treatment of depression. Primary outcomes were...
Nicotine is a widely-abused drug, yet its primary reinforcing effect does not seem potent as other stimulants such as cocaine. Recent research on the contributing factors toward chronic use of nicotine-containing products has implicated the role of reinforcement-enhancing effects of nicotine. The present study investigates whether phencyclidine (PCP) may also possess a reinforcement-enhancement...
Abstract Acutely administered 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ‘ecstasy’) has been proposed to have long-term positive effects on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms when combined with psychotherapy. No preclinical data support a mechanistic basis for these claims. Given the persistent nature of psychotherapeutic gains facilitated by MDMA, we hypothesized that MDMA improves...
INTRODUCTION: Adolescents with psychoses usually have full recovery from their first psychotic episode, but the first relapse often arises within 2 years of the first episode. Cannabis-related psychoses are difficult to distinguish from schizophrenic psychoses. Here, we describe a particularly severe clinical case, with a first psychotic episode occurring after heavy cannabis smoking, an...
Salvinorin A is a potent hallucinogen, isolated from the ethnomedical plant Salvia divinorum. Salvinorin A is a selective high efficacy kappa-opioid receptor (KOPr) agonist, and thus implicates the KOPr system and its endogenous agonist ligands (the dynorphins) in higher functions, including cognition and perceptual effects. Salvinorin A is the only selective KOPr ligand to be widely available...
September 7, 2015Karolina Dydak, Mariola Śliwińska‐mossoń, Halina Milnerowicz5 citations
Substances of plant origin have been used to induce hallucinations for a long time, in religious ceremonies and rituals as well as in pain relief. Psilocybin and psilocin naturally occur in the fungal genus Psilocybe. Due to the psychedelic effects and relative harmlessness of these substances and the fact that they do not cause physical addiction, psilocybin and psilocin recently have been...