14 DAY TRIAL // Harvard Medical School investigators found in a new study that smoking marijuana as a teenager does not lead to the development of schizophrenia later on in life, as some studies have suggested in the past.
The team was able to demonstrate that an underlying familial morbidity risk in former pot smokers who developed schizophrenia may have been poorly understood in other investigations, leading to the confusion, PsychCentral reports.
In other words, teens who went on to develop this terrible disease later on did not start exhibiting symptoms because they had smoked pot, but because they had a family history that predisposed them to the condition. This research also included scientists from VA Boston Healthcare system.
“In general, we found a tendency for depression and bipolar disorder to be increased in the relatives of cannabis users in both the patient and control samples. This might suggest that cannabis users are more prone to affective disorders than their non-using samples or vice versa,” the research group writes in a December issue of the journal Schizophrenia Research.