Yasmin Hurd, PhD

Unlocking the Biological Impact of Developmental Cannabis Exposure Relevant to Psychiatric Risk

The dramatic shift of the cannabis sociopolitical landscape has led to the decriminalization, medicalization, and legalization of cannabis use. As the perception of cannabis’ risk has diminished in society, there has been a greater urgency for cannabis research regarding mental health. One significant implication relates to vulnerable populations as pregnant women and teens given concerns as to the potential for cannabis to impact neurodevelopmental processes linked to psychopathology risk. This talk will provide information obtained from preclinical animal models and human studies to address questions regarding biological mechanisms that could underly protracted effects of cannabis/THC into later in life relevant to psychopathology risk and opportunities for intervention.

Dr. Yasmin Hurd is the Ward-Coleman Chair in Translational Neuroscience as well as Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Pharmacological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York. She is also the Director of the Addiction Institute at the Mount Sinai Behavioral Health System. She is an internationally renowned neuroscientist whose preclinical and clinical translational research examines the neurobiology of substance use disorders and related psychiatric disorders with primary focus on opioid abuse and the developmental effects of cannabis. Based on her high scientific accomplishments she was inducted into both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.

Reading List

Ellis, Randall J., et al. “Prenatal Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol exposure in males leads to motivational disturbances related to striatal epigenetic dysregulation.” Biological Psychiatry, vol. 92, no. 2, 15 July 2022, pp. 127–138, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2021.09.017.

Ferland, Jacqueline-Marie N., Randall J. Ellis, Graeme Betts, et al. “Long-term outcomes of adolescent THC exposure on translational cognitive measures in adulthood in an animal model and computational assessment of human data.” JAMA Psychiatry, vol. 80, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2023, p. 66, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.3915.

Ferland, Jacqueline-Marie N., Randall J. Ellis, Gregory Rompala, et al. “Dose mediates the protracted effects of adolescent THC exposure on reward and stress reactivity in males relevant to perturbation of the basolateral amygdala transcriptome.” Molecular Psychiatry, vol. 28, no. 6, 2 Mar. 2022, pp. 2583–2593, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01467-0.

Hinckley, Jesse D., et al. “The developmental trajectory to cannabis use disorder.” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 181, no. 5, 1 May 2024, pp. 353–358, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.20231006.

Rompala, Gregory, et al. “Maternal cannabis use is associated with suppression of immune gene networks in placenta and increased anxiety phenotypes in offspring.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 118, no. 47, 15 Nov. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106115118.