PsychopharmacologyJuly 1, 2023Ke Bin Xiao, Erin Grennell, Anthony Ngoy et al.
Cannabis self-administration studies may be helpful for identifying factors that influence cannabis consumption and subjective response to cannabis. Additionally, these paradigms could be useful for testing novel pharmacotherapies for cannabis use disorder. This scoping review aims to summarize the findings from existing ad libitum cannabis self-administration studies to determine what has been...
Psychoactive drugs modulate learning and emotional processes in ways that could impact their recreational and medical use. Recent work has revealed how drugs impact different stages of processing emotional episodic memories, specifically encoding (forming memories), consolidation (stabilizing memories), and retrieval (accessing memories). Drugs administered before encoding may preferentially...
Background The antidepressant effects of ketamine and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) are hypothesized to rely on mechanisms of long-term-potentiation and synaptic plasticity. Cannabis, via activation of CB1 receptors has been shown to impair synaptic plasticity, suggesting that cannabis use might moderate the antidepressant effects of ketamine and/or rTMS.
BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Diminished social motivation is a negative symptom of schizophrenia and leads to severe functional consequences for many patients suffering from the illness. However, there are no effective medications available to treat this symptom. Despite the lack of approved treatments for patients, there is a growing body of literature on the effects of several classes of drugs...
Drug abuse and addiction are major public health concerns, with millions of people worldwide affected by the negative consequences of drug use. To better understand this complex issue, a review was conducted to examine the mechanisms of action and effects of drugs of abuse, including their acute and chronic effects, the symptoms of abstinence syndrome, as well as their cardiovascular impacts....
An increasing number of studies have used positron emission tomography (PET) to investigate molecular neurobiological differences in individuals who use cannabis. This study aimed to systematically review PET imaging research in individuals who use cannabis or have cannabis use disorder (CUD). Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses criteria, a...
CannabisJune 1, 2023Selina Espinoza, Melissa-Ann Lagunas, Rocha Claudia et al.
More than half of the United States has legalized medicinal and/or recreational cannabis. The purpose of the study is to understand cannabis use and perceptions among college students with cannabis experience – 21 years and older – in a legalized cannabis state. Participants included 170 college students, the majority identified as female (72.9%, n = 124) and Latinx/Hispanic (55.9%, n = 95)....
Cannabis is the most common illicit substance used by adolescents and the third most common psychoactive substance after alcohol and nicotine. Cannabis use during adolescence interrupts a critical period of brain development and leads to inappropriate activation of the reward pathway. Because the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other executive functions, is not...
Cannabis use disorder (CUD) is widespread, and there is no pharmacotherapy to facilitate its treatment. AEF0117, the first of a new pharmacological class, is a signaling-specific inhibitor of the cannabinoid receptor 1 (CB1-SSi). AEF0117 selectively inhibits a subset of intracellular effects resulting from Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) binding without modifying behavior per se. In mice and...
Delta-8 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is a psychoactive substance from the Cannabis plant that has been rising in popularity in the United States since the 2018 US Farm Bill implicitly legalized it. This study reviewed research from peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed (e.g. anecdotal and news) reports related to delta-8 THC to summarize current knowledge and implications for public health and...
This case report presents a rare and severe complication of cannabis use in a 32-year-old male patient. The patient presented with status epilepticus and was found to have acute irreversible hippocampal toxic encephalopathy confirmed by MRI. Despite aggressive treatment with sedation and anti-epileptic therapy up to quad therapy, the patient's seizures were refractory to treatment. The patient...
The fact that not all cannabis users will develop psychosis suggests that cannabis may exert its causal role only in pre-disposed individuals. However, since the number of people who use cannabis worldwide is so high, those who will eventually develop psychosis, whilst still a minority, represent a large number. The evidence indicates that different patterns of cannabis use have a different...
AIDS and behaviorMay 8, 2023C. Watson, E. Sundermann, J. Helm et al.
Cannabis use is rapidly increasing among older adults in the United States, in part to treat symptoms of common health conditions (e.g., chronic pain, sleep problems). Longitudinal studies of cannabis use and cognitive decline in aging populations living with chronic disease are lacking. We examined different levels of cannabis use and cognitive and everyday function over time among 297 older...
Psychiatry ResearchMay 8, 2023Alex Gonzalez Segura, Anna Mané, L. Prohens et al.5 citations
Cannabis use is highly prevalent in first-episode psychosis (FEP) and plays a critical role in its onset and prognosis, but the genetic underpinnings promoting both conditions are poorly understood. Current treatment strategies for cannabis cessation in FEP are clearly inefficacious. Here, we aimed to characterize the association between cannabis-related polygenic risk scores (PRS) on cannabis...
BMC PsychiatryMay 5, 2023Stefan Roepke, Nikola Schoofs, Kathlen Priebe et al.
Distressing nightmares are a core symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and contribute to psychiatric comorbidity, impaired physical health and decreased social functioning. No specific pharmacological treatment for PTSD-related nightmares is yet approved. Preliminary clinical data indicate that cannabinoid agonists can improve nightmares and overall PTSD symptoms in patients with...
Negative emotional state has been found to correlate with poor cognitive performance in cannabis-dependent (CD) individuals, but not healthy controls (HCs). To examine the neural substrates underlying such unusual emotion-cognition coupling, we analyzed the behavioral and resting state fMRI data from the Human Connectome Project and found opposite brain-behavior associations in the CD and HC...
Abstract Background Childhood adversity and cannabis use are considered independent risk factors for psychosis, but whether different patterns of cannabis use may be acting as mediator between adversity and psychotic disorders has not yet been explored. The aim of this study is to examine whether cannabis use mediates the relationship between childhood adversity and psychosis. Methods Data were...
Abstract Background While cannabis use is a well-established risk factor for psychosis, little is known about any association between reasons for first using cannabis (RFUC) and later patterns of use and risk of psychosis. Methods We used data from 11 sites of the multicentre European Gene-Environment Interaction (EU-GEI) case–control study. 558 first-episode psychosis patients (FEPp) and 567...