Kayser Reilly R, Haney Margaret, Simpson Helen Blair
Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY, United States.
Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, United States.
Front Psychiatry. 2021 Feb 25;12:626150. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.626150. eCollection 2021.
Cannabis is increasingly used by individuals with mental health diagnoses and often purported to treat anxiety and various other psychiatric symptoms. Yet support for using cannabis as a psychiatric treatment is currently limited by a lack of evidence from rigorous placebo-controlled studies. While regulatory hurdles and other barriers make clinical trials of cannabis challenging to conduct, addiction researchers have decades of experience studying cannabis use in human laboratory models. These include methods to control cannabis administration, to delineate clinical and mechanistic aspects of cannabis use, and to evaluate potential treatment applications for cannabis and its constituents. In this paper, we review these human laboratory procedures and describe how each can be applied to study cannabis use in patients with psychiatric disorders. Because anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric illnesses affecting American adults, and anxiety relief is also the most commonly-reported reason for medicinal cannabis use, we focus particularly on applying human laboratory models to study cannabis effects in individuals with anxiety and related disorders. Finally, we discuss how these methods can be integrated to study cannabis effects in other psychiatric conditions and guide future research in this area.
患有精神健康疾病的人越来越多地使用大麻，人们常称大麻能治疗焦虑和其他各种精神症状。然而，目前由于缺乏来自严格安慰剂对照研究的证据，将大麻用作精神疾病治疗方法的依据有限。虽然监管障碍和其他阻碍使得大麻的临床试验开展起来颇具挑战性，但成瘾研究人员在人类实验室模型中研究大麻使用情况已有数十年经验。这些经验包括控制大麻给药的方法、描绘大麻使用的临床和机制方面，以及评估大麻及其成分的潜在治疗应用。在本文中，我们回顾这些人类实验室程序，并描述每种程序如何应用于研究精神疾病患者的大麻使用情况。由于焦虑症是影响美国成年人的最常见精神疾病之一，缓解焦虑也是药用大麻使用最常报告的原因，我们特别关注应用人类实验室模型来研究大麻对焦虑症及相关疾病患者的影响。最后，我们讨论如何整合这些方法来研究大麻在其他精神疾病中的作用，并指导该领域的未来研究。
