Teen Marijuana Users Face Higher Risk of Adult Depression, Suicidality, Meta-Analysis Suggests

Teenagers who use cannabis are at a significantly higher risk of developing major depression and suicidality as young adults, including a three-times greater risk of attempting suicide, according to ameta-analysis published yesterday inJAMA Psychiatry.“Cannabis is the mostly commonly used drug of abuse by adolescents in the world,” wrote Gabriella Gobbi, M.D., Ph.D., of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and colleagues. The authors systematically selected studies that assessed participants’ cannabis use when they were younger than 18 ye ars old; adjusted for depression, anxiety, and/or suicidality at baseline; and tracked development of depression in young adulthood (age 18 to 32 years). The meta-analysis included seven studies for depression, three for anxiety, three for suicidal ideation, and three for suicide attempts, totaling some 23,000 participants.The odds of developing depression in young adulthood was more than one-third higher among adolescents who used cannabis before age 18 (odds ratio [OR] = 1.4), compared with those who had not. The effect was more dramatic for suicidality: adolescents who used cannabis before age 18 were 50% more likely to think about suicide (pooled OR of 1.5) and more than three times more likely to have attempted suicide (pooled OR of 3.5) as young adults.Younger users of cannabis, age 14 and 15, were at significantly higher risk of suicidal behaviors, according to the report, and girls seemed more susceptible than boys to develop...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: adolescence anxiety cannabis depression Gabriella Gobbi JAMA Psychiatry marijuana meta-analysis suicidality suicide attempts suicide ideation Source Type: research