Cannabis Use May Cause Schizophrenia
Cannabis use has been linked to schizophrenia risk, and new genetic research suggests a causal relationship between the two. In a 2017 article in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, researcher Julian Vaucher and colleagues reported that lifetime cannabis use was linked to schizophrenia even when the researchers controlled for 10 genotypes weakly associated with lifetime cannabis use. This makes it unlikely that the schizophrenia caused the cannabis use, suggesting instead that it is the cannabis use that leads to a schizophrenia diagnosis.
Vaucher and colleageus also controlled for genetic associations between cigarette smoking and cannabis use to eliminate cigarette use as a third variable causing the association between cannabis and schizophrenia.
The study by Vaucher and colleagues included 34,241 people with schizophrenia and 45,604 healthy controls.
