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Depression directly affects one in six adults in their lifetime – and everything from pollution and artificial light to the bacteria that live in our gut could be (at least partly) to blame.
Now, a new article published in JAMA Psychiatry also establishes a link between mental illness and cannabis smoking during adolescence.
Previous research has suggested that cannabis use moderately increases the risk of developing depression. While others have found no significant badociation when other variables are taken into account. Still others suggest that cannabis use may actually be decrease symptoms.
The result is a mixture of results with no clear consensus on how cannabis affects mental health, at least with regard to depression.
Researchers from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and McGill University in Canada badyzed 11 international studies on the effects of marijuana use in children under 18 years of age and published since the mid-1990s. These studies were selected from 3,142 articles on the correlations between drug use in adolescence and mental health in old age. Together, they involved more than 23,000 people.
"We have looked at the effects of cannabis because its use in young people is very common, but the long-term effects are still poorly understood," said Andrea Cipriani, professor of psychiatry at the Institute's research institute. 39, University of Oxford, in a statement.
"We have carefully selected the best studies conducted since 1993 and have included only methodologically valid studies to rule out important confounders, such as American premorbid depression".
Their conclusion – one in 14 cases of depression in adults under 35 could be avoided if teenagers avoided cannabis. In concrete terms, this represents 400,000 diagnoses of depression in the United States, 25,000 diagnoses in Canada and 60,000 diagnoses in the United Kingdom. In addition, smoking cannabis before the age of 18 was badociated with an increased risk of a 350% suicide attempt.
The authors of the study suggest that this correlation could be related to the psychoactive ingredient of marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol or THC. Animal studies have found an badociation between exposure of adolescents to THC and the development of depressive disorders in adulthood, probably because it actually alters physiological neurodevelopment. of the adolescent brain.
It should be emphasized that these are badociations, revealing an interesting correlation, but do not (necessarily) causality. For example, cannabis use may not cause depression, but a propensity to develop it increases the likelihood that a person will take cannabis in the first place. Alternatively, there may be a third factor or factors (perhaps genetic or environmental) that are positively correlated with cannabis use and depression.
It should also be noted that the studies did not take into account participants' use of other drugs, or the amount and strength of cannabis they consumed, which could affect the results and magnitude of the risks badociated with the use of drugs. smoking cannabis.
Finally, while the results suggest that at the societal level, the problem is generalized, the risk to the individual is relatively modest.
"Our findings on depression and suicidality are very relevant to clinical practice and public health," continued Cipriani.
"Although the magnitude of the negative effects of cannabis may vary from one adolescent to another and that it is impossible to predict the exact risk for each adolescent, the generalized use cannabis among younger generations makes it an important public health problem. "
To sum up, there may be an badociation between cannabis use in adolescence and depression, but further research is needed to confirm and explain why.
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