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Readable research linked to original sources
Browse normalized, publication-ready research with direct links to its evidence and source.
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Readable research linked to original sources
Browse normalized, publication-ready research with direct links to its evidence and source.
20 articles
Newest firstAdolescent substance use can have a significant negative impact on life trajectories. Therefore, identifying factors associated with adolescent substance use is important. Previous research has identified parental religiosity as a factor associated with lower adolescent substance use. However, these studies suffered from a number of limitations and are often focussed on US samples, which limit the generalisability…
Open article record in new tab ↗Background and aims E-cigarettes can aid smoking cessation and reduce carcinogen exposure. Understanding differences in characteristics between young adults who quit smoking, with or without e-cigarettes, or dual use can help tailor interventions. The aim of this study was to describe first transitions from smoking and explore substance use, sociodemographic, and health characteristic associations with the probabi…
BackgroundParental smoking increases offspring smoking risk. Young people with mental health difficulties are more likely to have parents who smoke and start smoking themselves. Improving mental health in youth could help disrupt intergenerational cycles of nicotine use, but the extent to which depressive symptoms mediate the link between parental and offspring smoking remains unclear. MethodsWe used data on 6,729…
Open article record in new tab ↗Background and aims High-potency cannabis has been associated with increased risk of psychosis, but a lack of prospective data hinders understanding of causality in this relationship. This study aimed to combine prospective report of cannabis use with retrospective report of potency to infer the potency of cannabis used in adolescence and explore whether use of cannabis, and the use of high-potency cannabis, in ad…
Open article record in new tab ↗SummaryBackgroundThe role of alcohol use in the development of depression is unclear. We aimed to investigate whether alcohol dependence, but not high frequency or quantity of consumption, during adolescence increased the risk of depression in young adulthood.MethodsIn this prospective cohort study, we included adolescents who were born to women recruited to the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children in A…
Open article record in new tab ↗Background Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are classically defined as physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, emotional neglect, bullying, parental substance use or abuse, violence between parents, parental mental health problems or suicide, parental separation, or a parent convicted of criminal offence. Exposure to ACEs can be associated with cannabis use, but no comparisons across all adversities hav…
BACKGROUND AND AIMS: There are concerns that national population-based estimates of illicit drug use are underestimated. We investigated this by comparing estimates of illicit substance use at age 24 from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) with a birth cohort (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, ALSPAC) and by comparing the Smoking and Alcohol Toolkit Studies (STS/ATS) to ALSPAC. DESIGN: Cr…
Background Although studies have examined the association between tobacco and cannabis use in adolescence with subsequent cognitive functioning, study designs are usually not able to distinguish correlation from causation. Methods Separate patterns of tobacco and cannabis use were derived using longitudinal latent class analysis based on measures assessed on five occasions from age 13-18 in a large UK population c…
Open article record in new tab ↗BackgroundAlthough studies have examined the association between tobacco and cannabis use in adolescence with subsequent cognitive functioning, study designs are usually not able to distinguish correlation from causation. MethodsSeparate patterns of tobacco and cannabis use were derived using longitudinal latent class analysis based on measures assessed on five occasions from age 13 to 18 in a large UK population…
Open article record in new tab ↗BACKGROUND: Suicidal thoughts and non-suicidal self-harm are common in adolescents and are strongly associated with suicide attempts. We aimed to identify predictors of future suicide attempts in these high-risk groups. METHODS: Participants were from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a population-based birth cohort study in the UK. The sample included 456 adolescents who reported suicidal thoug…
Open article record in new tab ↗AIMS: The study aimed to examine the association between adolescent alcohol use and working memory (WM) using a large population sample. METHODS: Data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children were used to investigate the association between alcohol use at age 15 years and WM 3 years later, assessed using the N-back task (N ~ 3300). A three-category ordinal variable captured mutually exclusive alcoh…
Open article record in new tab ↗BACKGROUND: Only one-third of young people who experience suicidal ideation attempt suicide. It is important to identify factors which differentiate those who attempt suicide from those who experience suicidal ideation but do not act on these thoughts. METHODS: Participants were 4,772 members of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a UK population-based birth cohort. Suicide ideation and a…
Open article record in new tab ↗Recent research suggests a link between traumatic brain injury (TBI) in youth and later risk behaviour. We explored the association between mild TBI and psychiatric symptoms, substance use and criminal behaviour using data from a longitudinal birth cohort. Participants with mild TBI (n = 800), orthopaedic injuries (n = 2305) and no injuries (n = 8307) were identified from self and parent reports up to age 16 years…
Open article record in new tab ↗Substance use is associated with impaired social cognition. Experimental studies have shown that acute intoxication of alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis decreases the performance in non-verbal, social communication and theory of mind tasks. However, in epidemiological studies the temporal direction of this association has gone relatively unstudied. We investigated both directions of association within an adolescent b…
Open article record in new tab ↗Background. Patterns of risk behaviour during teenage years may vary by socio-economic status (SES). We aimed to examine possible associations between individual and multiple risk behaviours and three measures of SES in mid-adolescence. Methods. The sample (n = 6406) comprised participants from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a UK birth cohort. Thirteen risk behaviours spanning sexual health,…
Open article record in new tab ↗AbstractAimsTo investigate the relationship between cannabis and tobacco use by age 15 and subsequent educational outcomes.DesignBirth cohort study.SettingEngland.ParticipantsThe sample was drawn from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children; a core sample of 1155 individuals had complete information on all the variables.MeasurementsThe main exposures were cannabis and tobacco use at age 15 assessed in…
Open article record in new tab ↗IntroductionSubstance use is associated with common mental health disorders, but the causal effect of specific substances is uncertain. We investigate whether adolescent cannabis and cigarette use is associated with incident depression and anxiety, while attempting to account for confounding and reverse causation.MethodsWe used data from ALSPAC, a UK birth cohort study, to investigate associations between cannabis…
Open article record in new tab ↗There is a large body of pre-clinical and some clinical data to link the neuropeptide galanin to a range of physiological and pathological functions that include metabolism, depression, and addiction. An enhancer region upstream of the human GAL transcriptional start site has previously been characterised. In-vitro transfection studies in rat hypothalamic neurons demonstrated that the CA allele was 40% less active…
Open article record in new tab ↗AimsTo investigate the prevalence of cannabis use and problem use in boys and girls at age 16 years, and to investigate the role of adversity in early life and of conduct disorder between the ages of 4 and 13 years as risk factors for these outcomes.DesignBirth cohort study.SettingEngland.ParticipantsA total of 4159 (2393 girls) participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) birth coh…
Aims: Teenagers in the UK report some of the highest rates of alcohol use in Europe. We identify patterns of alcohol use in early adolescence and relate these to hazardous and harmful alcohol use at age 16. Methods: In a UK birth cohort, we analysed repeated measures of alcohol use from age 13 to 15 in a sample of 7100 adolescents. Data on drinking frequency and typical consumption when drinking were modelled sepa…
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