Abstract
Major neurocognitive changes occur during adolescence, making this phase one of the most critical developmental periods of life. Furthermore, this phase in life is also the time in which youth substance use begins. Several studies have demonstrated the differential associations of alcohol and cannabis use concerning the neurocognitive functioning of both males and females. Past and contemporary literature on gender-specific effects in neuroscience of addiction is predominantly based on cross-sectional datasets and data that is limited in terms of measurement variability. Given the importance of gender-specific effects in addiction studies, and in order to address the two above-mentioned gaps in the literature, the present study aimed to compare neurocognitive functioning of male and female adolescents in the context of cannabis and alcohol use, while employing a longitudinal design with multiple repeated measurements. Participants were 3,826 high school students (47% female; mean age, 12.7), who were recruited from 31 high schools in the greater Montreal area. Participants were requested to complete annual surveys for five consecutive years, from 7th to 11th grade, assessing their alcohol/cannabis use and neurocognitive functioning (working memory, delayed recall memory, perceptual reasoning, and inhibition control). The analytical strategy focused on the longitudinal association between each predictor (female, male) and each of the outcomes (domains of neurocognitive functioning). Multilevel linear models assessed the association of alcohol and cannabis consumption and the four domains of neurocognitive functioning. Results revealed a gender by within-subject interaction, suggesting a weaker effect of yearly fluctuation of cannabis use on working memory among males compared to females. Our findings suggest a different pattern of neurocognitive impairment of female and male working memory after using cannabis over the course of adolescence. Early initiation of cannabis use potentially results in more spatial working memory deficits in female adolescents. This may negatively influence young females’ capacity in academic settings and lead to significant impairment in adulthood, which critically decreases the individual’s quality of life.
Highlights
Given the increased rate of substance use from early to late adolescence (Duncan et al, 2006), it is becoming more and more critical to understand the effects of substance use on teens’ neurocognitive functioning
Heavy drinking during adolescence has been indicated as a significant factor for declined memory (Mahmood et al, 2010) and impaired neurocognitive functioning (Mahmood et al, 2010), while cannabis use has been demonstrated to be associated with short-term and long-term cognitive deficits, such as impaired inhibitory control and working memory (Volkow et al, 2016; Morin et al, 2019)
The predictor terms were as follows: gender, socioeconomic status, linear and quadratic effects of time, between-subject differences in consumption measured by average substance use over all waves, within-subject difference in consumption measured by current year change in use with regards to participant’s mean use, and lagged within-subject measured by past year change in use with regards to participant’s
Summary
Given the increased rate of substance use from early to late adolescence (Duncan et al, 2006), it is becoming more and more critical to understand the effects of substance use on teens’ neurocognitive functioning. This could reflect normal adolescent-specific behaviors (risktaking, novelty-seeking, response to peer pressure) that increase the probability of someone experimenting with substances, and perhaps could reflect the incomplete development neurocognitive functioning (Sowell et al, 2004) The latter has been demonstrated by previous work showing that, relative to young adults and older people, the balance between adolescents’ reward motivation and executive control is not fully developed, making adolescents more prone to engaging in health-risk behaviors such as alcohol use and cannabis use (Hammond et al, 2014). While extending previous and contemporary cross-sectional works, we developed a longitudinal study in which we compared male and female adolescent neurocognitive functioning (i.e., working memory, recall memory, perceptual reasoning, and inhibitory control) in the context of alcohol and cannabis We analyzed this prospective data using a multilevel statistical framework allowing for the dissociation of three different, yet potentially additive (or interacting), associations of low neurocognitive functioning and substance use: common vulnerability, time-varying concurrent (same year) relationships, and time-varying lagged relationships. Based on previous works on the different levels of vulnerability of females and males to substance use in samples of adults and adolescents (Medina et al, 2008; Squeglia et al, 2009, 2011, 2012; Alfonso-Loeches et al, 2013; Ewing et al, 2014; McHugh et al, 2018), we hypothesized that there is a difference between neurocognitive functioning of males and females linked to alcohol and cannabis use over the course of adolescence
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