Study finds no link between teen marijuana use, mental health issues

Some recent research studies have advised which typically youngsters that use cannabis are on elevated hazard for scourge, false beliefs, hallucinations along with other psychotic indications, bronchial asthma and also other breathing problem troubles at some point later in life, yet this survey found no these kinds of backlinks. The researchers found no link between teen marijuana use and lifetime depression, anxiety, allergies, headaches or high blood pressure.

A new study show that there is no link between chronic marijuana use as an adolescent and their mental or physical health.

The study, published by the American Physiological Association, did not include teenage girls. Indeed, lead researcher Jordan Bechtold was expecting to find similar results and said what they discovered was “a little surprising”.

Researchers followed 408 participants who’d been part of the Pittsburgh Youth Study, which started tracking 14-year-old public school students in Pittsburgh in 1987 to analyze health and social issues. Fifty-four percent were black, 42 percent were white and 4 percent were from other racial/ethnic groups. The second group smoked regularly (22 percent); the third group smoked marijuana only during their teen years (11 percent); and the fourth group consisted of those who started smoking during their teenage years and continued using the drug throughout the rest of their lives (21 percent). There were no differences in the findings based on race or ethnicity.

The paper was one of just a few studies focusing on the long-term health effects of teenage marijuana use, which has tracked hundreds of participants for more than two decades of their lives, Dr Bechtold said.

Researchers noted that early chronic users peaked at smoking marijuana an average 200 times per year by age 22 and then slowly declining the frequency of their usage.

There had been some evidence to suggest that regular marijuana use among teenagers was linked to mental problems such as depression and schizophrenia. Since the study included only males, there were no findings or conclusions about women.

“We wanted to help inform the debate about legalization of marijuana, but it’s a very complicated issue and one study should not be taken in isolation”, Bechtold informs.