Backgrounder: Canadian Cannabis and Brain Health Consortium
Backgrounder
The Canadian Cannabis and Brain Health Consortium (CCBHC) is bringing together leading researchers from across Canada to advance understanding of how cannabis affects brain health throughout the lifespan. These multidisciplinary projects will investigate cannabis use across diverse populations and health conditions—from pregnancy, youth and aging to mental health, psychosis, epilepsy, PTSD, sleep and cannabis use disorder. Together, the research will generate evidence to better inform clinical care, public health policy and harm reduction strategies.
| Lead Researcher | Research Institution | Project Title |
|---|---|---|
| Annie Ouellet | Université de Sherbrooke | Cannabis Exposure from Pregnancy to Early Childhood: A Family-Triad Brain Health Program CAN-B+FAM |
| James Mackillop | McMaster University | Advancing the CCBHC by Leveraging Existing Longitudinal Cohorts and Investigating Psilocybin as a Novel Treatment for Cannabis Use Disorder |
| Natalie Castellanos Ryan | Université de Montréal | Cannabis use-related harms on neurocognition and mental health: harnessing long-term longitudinal cohorts to study persistence, recovery, risk and resilience. |
| David Hammond | University of Waterloo | Population-based cohort studies of cannabis use: scaling novel measures of cannabis consumption to examine health risks and brain health. |
| Stéphane Potvin | Université de Montréal | Expanding Research on High-Potency Cannabis Use in Psychosis: Longitudinal Neurobiological Investigations and Evaluation of a Novel Virtual Reality Intervention for Cannabis Use Disorder |
| Dang Nguyen | Université de Montréal | Non-medical cannabis use in people with epilepsy |
| Sherry Stewart | Dalhousie University | CAN-P: A Team Engaged in Cognitive-Neuroscience Investigations of Cannabis and PTSD links. |
| Iris Balodis | McMaster University | NeuroValue: Cannabinoid variability and the biobehavioural architecture of valuation |
| Rachel Rabin | McGill University | Youth Cannabis Outcomes and Neurodevelopmental and Clinical Trajectories (Y-CONECT) |
| Leah Mayo | University of Calgary | CannSleep: Exploring the relationship between cannabis and sleep in a nationally representative Canadian cohort and randomized controlled trial in PTSD |