There has been a long established belief that there is a link between cannabis use and psychotic disorders. It is well documented that the rate of people who enjoy pot is higher among those who are diagnosed with schizophrenia than it is in the general population.
In addition, there are some that believe that using cannabis can lead to more psychotic issues and possibly even worsen a person’s existing symptoms, and that the drug might even trigger the psychotic disorder known as Schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is classified as a psychotic disorder hailing by hallucinations, delusion and jumbled thoughts. The disorder is primarily inherited and it affects about 1 percent of the population. The risk jumps to about 10 percent for children with schizophrenic parents, and to 50 percent for twins with one twin having the disorder.
However, a new study by Robert Power, a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, shows that a link between the two might actually be due to both of them being linked with the same genes. “To some extent, those genes that we have identified as being ‘schizophrenia-inducing’ are also genes that can contribute to cannabis use,” Power said.
Power’s studied the pot-smoking habits of 2,082 healthy people, focusing on their genetic profiles and the genes that have been identified as related to schizophrenia. The results showed that people who had genes linked with schizophrenia were also more likely to use cannabis, and use it more frequently, compared with people who didn’t have the schizophrenia-risk genes, recently published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
So in English, cannabis doesn’t necessarily cause schizophrenia – people with the disorder just tend to fire up more.
The new study concluded that the role of cannabis in causing schizophrenia is overestimated. It’s essentially a catch 22 and both scenarios are true: that cannabis may cause schizophrenia… but people with schizophrenia are more likely to use cannabis for various reasons. For that reason, patients with mental illnesses will use cannabis to self-medicate and several sudies have found that the drug can help alleviate some short term symptoms of schizophrenia.
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