ArticleJournal of psychopathology and clinical science2024
Limited psychological and social effects of lifetime cannabis use frequency: Evidence from a 30-year community study of 4,078 twins.
Article in Journal of psychopathology and clinical science, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Behavioral Disinhibition Model of Addiction: A Review and New Findings from the Minnesota Twin Family Study.Behavior genetics · 2026Review
- Genetic influences and causal pathways shared between cannabis use disorder and other substance use traits.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Article
- Mental Health, Substance Use, and Related Factors Associated with Recent Use of Cannabis for Sleep: A Co-Twin Control Study.Behavioral sleep medicineArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundCannabis use is associated with outcomes like income, legal problems, and psychopathology. This finding rests largely on correlational research designs, which rely at best on statistical controls for confounding. Here, we control for unmeasured confounders using a longitudinal study of twins.
methodIn a sample of 4,078 American adult twins first assessed decades ago, we used cotwin control mixed effects models to evaluate the effect of lifetime average frequency of cannabis consumption measured on substance use, psychiatric, and psychosocial outcomes.
resultsOn average, participants had a lifetime cannabis frequency of about one to two times per month, across adolescence and adulthood. As expected, in individual-level analyses, cannabis use was significantly associated with almost all outcomes in the expected directions. However, when comparing each twin to their cotwin, which inherently controls for shared genes and environments, we observed within-pair differences consistent with possible causality in three of the 22 assessed outcomes: cannabis use disorder symptoms (βW-Pooled = .15, SE = .02, p = 1.7 × 10-22), frequency of tobacco use (βW-Pooled = .06, SE = .01, p = 1.2 × 10-5), and illicit drug involvement (βW-Pooled = .06, SE = .02, p = 1.2 × 10-4). Covariate specification curve analyses indicated that within-pair effects on tobacco and illicit drug use, but not cannabis use disorder, attenuated substantially when covarying for lifetime alcohol and tobacco use.
conclusionsThe cotwin control results suggest that more frequent cannabis use causes small increases in cannabis use disorder symptoms, approximately 1.3 symptoms when going from a once-a-year use to daily use. For other outcomes, our results are more consistent with familial confounding, at least in this community population of twins. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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