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Natasha Wade

Natasha Wade

Associate Professor of Psychiatry at UC San Diego and licensed clinical neuropsychologist researching how cannabis and substance use affect adolescent brain development.

Sep 11, 2026

5:12
What did you find, top level?
5:14
Yeah.
5:15
So we've been following some, about 11,000 kids across the country for, uh, almost a decade now, and we have about seven years of data that we used here.
5:25
They start, we started when they were 9 or 10 years old, before they started using, and by the time they're 16 or 17 years old, um, over 2,000 of those kids we've identified as using cannabis now and have started using cannabis.
5:38
And the, the big take-home is that the kids who started using cannabis, the teenagers were not de- showing the same gains in thinking abilities as their peers who were not using, and this was even after we control for whether they're using alcohol or nicotine or any other substances, prenatal exposure, early childhood mental health concerns, family factors, sociodemographic factors.
6:01
Uh, and so we see that there's some link between cannabis and perhaps reducing Uh, cognitive trajectories over time.
6:09
Not necessarily directly, we can't say it's ca- it's causal, uh, but there is a relationship between cognition in, in teens.

11 MINS LATER

16:52
What do you tell them?

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