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

I don't think dramatically. I think we're pretty comparable. I mean, for cannabis rates, I would say they're almost the same. I've not seen – sure, you might get some regional differences. Like we – I think Quebec has much lower rates of cannabis use than some other parts of Canada. And you guys probably in some southern states maybe are a bit different than other states.

So I don't know about that. But again, overall at a federal level, I think the – which is where most of the data aggregates, I would say that they're pretty comparable with each other. They're not wildly different at all. And again, even if you talk about climate, a lot of the US is a lot warmer than Canada. And you guys are certainly closer to the equator than we are.

So I mean, we know like you do see higher rates of schizophrenia in urban settings than you do in rural settings.

There's other, I mean, you also have more like, there's just, yeah, there's a lot of transitory populations that come in and out of cities that you don't see as much in rural communities. There's a lot more mental health services. There's other variables that can influence that. No one's really, I think, sussed out a mechanism to explain why you see that.

So there are things that shift across places, but I don't think it has anything to do with the rates of cannabis use. And I mean, the other thing that became very interesting in this whole debate over the last 15 odd years that people have really been talking about this a lot more is the fact that

There's also been several studies now that have done genetics either at the GWAS level or just even just looking at polygenic risk scores. And there's at least three papers that I can think of off the top of my head that I could put the citations down for for sure after this that do –

look at this from a somewhat, let's say, unbiased perspective where they see, you know, there's certainly some genetic architecture that relates to people either initiating cannabis use or people developing cannabis use disorder. And there's clearly some genetic architecture that relates to risk for schizophrenia.

And what these studies have found kind of across the three of them was quite similar, which was from their analysis, the directionality suggested much more that having genetic risk for schizophrenia predicted cannabis use, more so than cannabis use predicted the development of schizophrenia. Interesting.

So what that would mean is that there is some underlying biology that might be shared between a biological vulnerability to develop schizophrenia and some factor that relates to people using and or liking and or excessively using cannabis.

So, I mean, and this is, you know, I've debated with other researchers in the area in print and in person about the different interpretations of this. And one of the possibilities is, again, this idea of self-medication. I mean, independent of there being some underlying biological… thing that just is a third variable that explains the relationship between cannabis and schizophrenia.

The other possibility is self-medication. And there are some studies that suggest this and others that don't support it. Anecdotally, from having done work in the community and talked to individuals who have schizophrenia, who use cannabis, what their perspective on it is, what I've heard from a few of them is the medications that they're provided to manage the disease are

relatively effective at managing, let's say, the positive symptoms like hallucinations, delusions. That aspect of the disease is somewhat well managed. But then there's another component, which is the negative symptoms, which is kind of like things that, you know, abolition. So I don't like engaging in stuff. There's some anxiety, some depression, some social withdrawal. And

A lot of the medications don't manage that component of the disease, and they have said that they find cannabis helps that side of it, or it helps them de-arouse a little bit. Even though a lot of them recognize it may trigger the development of some of the positive symptoms, they feel that they don't have any tool in their kit to manage the negative symptoms.

And so it could be, in my mind, when I look at that, it could be a bit of a vicious cycle, where someone's using it to kind of band-aid one aspect, but making other aspects of the disease worse at the same time. So it can get very complicated, but...

So, I mean, there are various ways of looking at this in terms of, you know, so it's either you could say there's a causal argument, which is made by many saying cannabis causes schizophrenia. And therefore, if we eradicated it, I think you had alluded to something like that in the last podcast, that if you removed it would have this big effect. in terms of reducing schizophrenia rates.

And that's similar to the argument that a lot of the researchers in Britain have made. And I'm not personally convinced of that. And I say that simply because I look at the data from Scandinavia and I'm like, well, there you have a population that barely uses any cannabis and yet their schizophrenia rates are the same. So the only way in my mind

If I look at this kind of scientifically from a data perspective that cannabis could be causing schizophrenia de novo in a subset of people is that there must be an equal proportion of people for whom for some reason and somehow cannabis is preventing them from developing schizophrenia so that it's a zero-sum game at the end of the day and there's no change in rates.

Like I can't actually understand any other model that could explain this. Yeah.

for in like heredity family trees, for example, where you look at something like bipolar schizophrenia, the two do kind of track together. So it's not, I mean, I think it's hard to separate these in some capacity because, you know, I remember years ago at Society for Neuroscience, Glenn Close was one of the, I don't know if you were at that meeting,

Glenn Close was one of the public speakers and she had talked about schizophrenia and her family tree and she kind of put up this family tree of her family and the previous relatives in her family and showed the individuals who had schizophrenia and bipolar as well.

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