Associations of cannabis and cigarette use with depression and anxiety at age 18: findings from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children

Gage, Suzanne H., Hickman, Matthew, Heron, Jon, Munafò, Marcus R., Lewis, Glyn, Macleod, John and Zammit, Stanley ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2647-9211 2015. Associations of cannabis and cigarette use with depression and anxiety at age 18: findings from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. PLoS ONE 10 (4) , e0122896. 10.1371/journal.pone.0122896

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Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Substance use is associated with common mental health disorders, but the causal effect of specific substances is uncertain. We investigate whether adolescent cannabis and cigarette use is associated with incident depression and anxiety, while attempting to account for confounding and reverse causation. METHODS: We used data from ALSPAC, a UK birth cohort study, to investigate associations between cannabis or cigarettes (measured at age 16) and depression or anxiety (measured at age 18), before and after adjustment for pre-birth, childhood and adolescent confounders. Our imputed sample size was 4561 participants. RESULTS: Both cannabis (unadjusted OR 1.50, 95% CI 1.26, 1.80) and cigarette use (OR 1.37, 95% CI 1.16, 1.61) increased the odds of developing depression. Adjustment for pre-birth and childhood confounders partly attenuated these relationships though strong evidence of association persisted for cannabis use. There was weak evidence of association for cannabis (fully adjusted OR 1.30, 95% CI 0.98, 1.72) and insufficient evidence for association for cigarette use (fully adjusted OR = 0.97, 95% CI 0.75, 1.24) after mutually adjusting for each other, or for alcohol or other substance use. Neither cannabis nor cigarette use were associated with anxiety after adjustment for pre-birth and childhood confounders. CONCLUSIONS: Whilst evidence of association between cannabis use and depression persisted after adjusting for pre-term and childhood confounders, our results highlight the difficulties in trying to estimate and interpret independent effects of cannabis and tobacco on psychopathology. Complementary methods are required to robustly examine effects of cannabis and tobacco on psychopathology.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG) Medicine
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Additional Information:	: © 2015 Gage et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
ISSN:	1932-6203
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Date of Acceptance:	24 February 2015
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 15:52
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/81552

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