Dr. Matthew Hill

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614 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard Jul 2024

Dr. Matthew Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Huberman Lab · How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks | Dr. Matthew Hill · 8 Jul 2024 podcast

And then the adverse effects when someone consumes too much and they have a negative response, that's probably due to the higher dose starting to saturate on the inhibitory neurons. Now, we obviously can never test something like that in humans because we can't know. But based on what we've seen in animals, that's...

my theory of kind of how this is working and why we see these kind of classic biphasic effects. So yeah, too much THC, not a good thing, because then you start maybe disinhibiting things like the amygdala and producing these kind of panicky, anxiogenic-like outcomes. On that scale though, I mean, paranoia, obviously that's a hard, I don't know how you study that in a rodent.

I mean, that's just a strange thing. So, but I mean, that's kind of the precedent of when you start going into the psychosis, because obviously paranoia would be a big component of that. Someone wants to ask me a question about, you know, have, you know, what happens in the brain, like imaging wise, when someone's having like a psychotic episode from cannabis?

And I was kind of thinking like, how would that study get done?

I can't actually even imagine how that would go down. So I'm like, this is something I don't think we're ever going to have an answer to because I don't think you can actually ever test it. But in terms of people having this kind of psychotic response, it is pretty... rare.

I mean, and I say this because I can think of in Canada, kind of whenever it's happened and someone has actually done something wildly unpredictable because they've had a psychotic response to cannabis, it tends to make headlines. So it's not common. I could not give you an actual number, but it's certainly not a frequent thing because we would hear about this a lot more if we did.

I wouldn't say... I mean, there's certainly... Cannabis is used in tandem with other drugs, alcohol, psychedelics at times for sure. But that being said, I mean, there is clearly a population of people that use cannabis as their only drug that they use. I don't think that's that uncommon. But in the context of the psychosis stuff, I would definitely say – Sure.

I mean, if someone mixed it with amphetamine or something, you could have a very unpredictable response. But I mean, I think the psychotic responses that have been documented are usually purely due to cannabis. Like it's not necessarily due to some kind of drug interaction there.

There is something about the way that cannabis is changing the way the brain functions in a way that for people who seem to be prone to this, they can have a psychotic response. Again, I don't think it's a very typical thing, but... And we're talking about what that means in the context of like an actual disorder, like a chronic disorder like schizophrenia, which is characterized by psychosis.

I think we're talking about a whole different ballgame here. And this is an area that is, I mean, I think it's an important thing to discuss in the context of science because you can't establish causality. Like in my view, it's virtually impossible because there's just no way to control all the variables that play into this. What we can say definitively is that

individuals who have schizophrenia, first of all, they use cannabis at a higher rate than the general population. That's very clear. Yeah. They definitely use cannabis at a higher rate than the general population. There is definitely a relationship between using cannabis and having the initiation of the development of schizophrenia.

And this is where a lot of the statistics that have been used to develop the risk assessment essentially like so that you have a greater risk if you know like you were saying if you've used cannabis as a teenager you use high potency as a lot of the research has shown though they've done these studies and they say it relates to um a greater risk of schizophrenia essentially

This is just a statistical association that they found that people who use cannabis, the conversion into schizophrenia happens at a higher rate and there's more people with schizophrenia who are using cannabis.

To be honest, in all the research I've – in all the literature I've read on this, I don't ever remember there being clear sex descriptions of the differences of males and females. I mean, again, historically, cannabis was more used by males than females, so that could lean towards any bias that may be out there in the media or the popular – like just in general, what people talk about.

I can't think of any study that I've ever read that explicitly said this was male bias per se. They usually just report numbers or proportions of people. The issue is, So yes, there's this relationship that exists. And yes, we know that cannabis can trigger psychotic episodes.

So if there's an individual who has schizophrenia, we know for certain that cannabis can lead to the onset of, you know, increases in positive symptoms like hallucinations and delusions and a full-blown psychotic episode. So I think the first thing to say, which is very clear, is in my view, if someone has schizophrenia, cannabis is contraindicated.

Like you shouldn't be using cannabis if you have schizophrenia. I think that's a risk across the board.

So I was going to say, the next question is knowing who's going to develop schizophrenia. Obviously, we don't know this. And as you say, the only real predictive variable that we know of is a first-degree family member that has schizophrenia means that you have a higher risk of developing schizophrenia. So again, same with bipolar. I would say if there's bipolar or schizophrenia in a family,

To me, those are the people who should avoid cannabis. Just in terms of the likelihood, there's a much greater likelihood that they'd have, it would relate to the onset of a disease or could accelerate its presentation in some capacity. I think where things get really complicated in this whole cannabis schizophrenia story is the causality.

And there is a camp of people who have looked at this literature and definitively believe that cannabis causes schizophrenia. Um, and they attribute a proportion of people who have schizophrenia to only having that schizophrenia because of the fact that they used cannabis. Um, and I think you'd had some discussion about this in the last podcast.

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