• Question: What are the other factors you need to look at before deciding whether a person's illness is caused by cannabis consumption?

    Asked by molly21 to Suzi on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Hi @molly21
      This is a brilliant question!!!

      It’s really important when trying to work out whether 2 things (in this case cannabis and psychosis) are related, that there’s no extra factor related to BOTH things that’s actually driving the effect.

      For example, it may be that people who smoke cannabis, and get psychosis also all live in cities. City life has been linked to higher levels of psychosis, and also it’s easier to get hold of drugs like cannabis in cities.

      Other things I’d consider would be gender, as boys get psychosis more often than girls, also age is important, whether they also smoke cigarettes, whether they also use other drugs like alcohol or illegal drugs like ecstacy or cocaine.

      I don’t know yet everything that I will look at, because I’m still designing my experiment at the moment.

      Once I know all the things I think might be important, when I put my data in to my statistics programme I can include all these other factors in to the statistical model and make sure it’s not them that’s causing any relationship I find.

      Hope this answers your question, it’s a really important thing to consider!

      🙂

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