Cannabis, which is increasingly legally available, both for therapeutic and recreational use, is now one of the most commonly used drugs worldwide. Of people who have ever used cannabis, studies vary, but they estimate that about 10-25 percent of people who use cannabis go on to develop cannabis use disorder.

Uri Bright is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale School of Medicine and is one of the authors of a recent study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology on the genetics of cannabis lifetime use — which is anyone who has ever used cannabis even once. That’s a distinct population from people who have cannabis use disorder, as his colleagues had looked into in the previous study.

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Worry seems like something most people do from time to time, but for some people, severe worry can become an overwhelming sensation, and for older adults later in life, severe worry has been associated with an increased risk of stroke and coronary heart disease. Carmen Andreescu is a professor of psychiatry and bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She says mild worry is useful evolutionarily, to help us make plans or adapt behavior.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-025-02193-1

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There’s been a fair amount of animal data suggesting that nicotine can affect the developing brain, but there hadn’t been the equivalent human studies done on people whose brains are still developing. And today there are two predominant forms of nicotine delivery - tobacco cigarettes, and e-cigarettes, or vaping.

Laurie Zawertailo is a senior scientist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and an associate professor in the department of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Toronto. Kanwar Boparai recently completed her PhD, working with Dr. Zawertailo, and is now a postdoc. For their new study, they and some colleagues recruited young adults age 18-25, and these people fell into three groups: one that had only smoked cigarettes, one that had only ever vaped, and a third that functioned as a control, that had never used either. They ended up with 26 smokers, 27 vapers, and 25 controls. This is the first human study to separate cigarette smokers and vapers into distinct groups.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-025-02086-3

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