Affect dysregulation in cannabis abusers

Abstract

Psychiatric comorbidity and impaired emotional functioning have been previously reported in adult substance abusers but have been less well documented in adolescents. Thus, we investigated mental health problems and emotion regulation abilities in adolescents and young adults with cannabis dependence. Moreover, we explored the relationships between consumption modalities and affective style. Therefore, 32 cannabis abusers (CA) and 30 healthy controls completed a battery of self-reports measuring depression (BDI-13), anxiety (STAI-Y), alexithymia (TAS20; BVAQ-B), anhedonia (PAS; SAS), and sensation seeking (SSS). The MINI was administered to evaluate cannabis dependence and axis I DSM-IV comorbid diagnoses. A semi-structured clinical interview was given to determine psychoactive substance use. Statistical analyses revealed that more than half of the CA reported at least one other non-drug or alcohol comorbid diagnosis. The most common were mood and anxiety disorders. CA subjects scored significantly higher on all affective dimensions except alexithymia total scores; however, they had greater scores for the two subscales measuring the difficulties in identifying feelings. Logistic regressions demonstrated that CA subjects were more likely to experience high levels of trait anxiety, physical anhedonia and sensation seeking than the controls. Various correlations were observed between the affective scores and the substance considered. The amount of substance use and, particularly, the prevalence of polydrug use we observed are alarming. This study demonstrates that cannabis dependence in adolescents and young adults is related to a great psychological distress and specific emotional dimensions and puts emphasis on the importance of substance use prevention as early as middle school.

Where Is the Pleasure in That? Low Hedonic Capacity Predicts Smoking Onset and Escalation

“…Indeed, other studies have demonstrated associations between anhedonia and use of other drugs, including cocaine and amphetamine ( Leventhal et al, 2008( Leventhal et al, , 2010, cannabis ( BonnMiller, Zvolensky, Marshall, & Bernstein, 2007 ;Dorard, Berthoz, Phan, Corcos, & Bungener, 2008 ;Dumas et al, 2002 ;Johnson, Bonn-Miller, Leyro, & Zvolensky, 2009 ), and opiates ( Zijlstra, Veltman, Booij, van den Brink, & Franken, 2009 ). Regardless of whether low hedonic capacity may confer risk to other drugs of abuse, the current study suggests that this trait may be an important variable to identify youth at risk for smoking.…”

Increased Activation of the Supragenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex during Visual Emotional Processing in Male Subjects with High Degrees of Alexithymia: An Event-Related fMRI Study

“…Moreover, alexithymia is associated with an enhanced risk of psychological impairment including chronic pain, somatoform disorders, addictive disorders, anxiety and depression [3,4,5,6,7]. Several neurobiological models of alexithymia have been proposed [4,5,6].…”

“…Another model involves dysfunction of the right hemisphere evidenced by the fact that highly alexithymic individuals and patients with right hemisphere lesion show difficulties in recognizing facial expressions of emotions [2,3]. We focus on the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) deficit model [7] since it is supported by functional imaging studies on healthy subjects [8,9,10,11] as well as by lesion studies [12,13,14,15,16] and has been in the focus of neuroimaging studies on alexithymia [4,17,18,19]. According to this model, alexithymia is associated with impoverished conscious experience of emotion caused by an altered function of the ACC.…”

Cannabis Involvement and Nonsuicidal Self-Injury: A Discordant Twin Approach

“…Although this initial evidence hints at an association, no study to date has examined escalation in NSSI vulnerability associated with early cannabis use. Furthermore, mechanisms underlying this association have not been examined, but may include (a) shared genetic influences, as genetic factors have been shown to influence both cannabis use (Verweij et al, 2010) and NSSI (Maciejewski et al, 2014); (b) shared environmental influences (e.g., familial environment); (c) shared individual-specific risk factors, such as emotion dysregulation (Dorard et al, 2008;Yurkowski et al, 2015) or childhood sexual abuse (Klonsky & Moyer, 2008;Sartor et al, 2013); or (d) causal mechanisms, whereby early initiation of cannabis directly increases the likelihood of NSSI or vice versa.…”