PhD Studentship: In Psychology: Cannabis, Tobacco and Psychiatric Disease: Examining the Impact of Single and Combined-use on Brain Structure and Function (MRC Funded)
This PhD project will ask:
Can we isolate the relationships between cannabis use, tobacco use and psychiatric disease through triangulation of data from cohort studies and brain imaging studies, and across statistical methods that differ in their ability to make causal links?
International impact:
Understanding the impact of single and combined use on brain regions will inform conclusions about the influence of these substances on psychiatric disease, and will have important policy implications, in the UK and around the globe.
Aims and method:
- Study 1: Systematic review and meta-analysis of imaging studies exploring the association between cannabis, tobacco use and psychiatric disease.
- Study 2: A cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis using pre-existing data from cohort studies with imaging data (IMAGEN, UK Biobank) to examine the association between dual and single cannabis/tobacco use and its impact on brain structure and function.
- Study 3: The student will collect novel data via fMRI. Results from Study 2 will determine a-priori regions of interest used in this study.
