Big Data in the Cannabis Industry: From Smarter Grows to a Major Psychosis Study

Big data is changing the cannabis industry on two fronts: it helps growers and companies dial in cultivation, production and product design, and it lets researchers mine huge health records to see how cannabis actually affects people. As legalization and acceptance spread, the plant is generating an enormous pile of data, from strain profiles and therapeutic results to consumption habits and market preferences.

Big data analytics — collecting, crunching and applying information at massive scale — is fertile ground for the cannabis industry. From optimizing grows and production lines to personalizing the user experience and pushing scientific research forward, data is reshaping the way we deal with a plant humans have used for thousands of years.

Here's a look at how cannabis and big data are teaming up to shape the industry's future, and how, little by little, they're untangling what weed really does inside the body.

What big data says about cannabis and psychotic disorders

In a pioneering study, a team of scientists in Portugal took a deep dive into the possible link between cannabis use and psychotic disorders. Using a big data approach, the researchers examined records of Portuguese patients collected between 2000 and 2015, provided by the Administração Central dos Serviços de Saúde, the country's central health services administration.

The study was observational and retrospective: its main goal was to analyze the relationship between cannabis use and the incidence of psychotic disorders among patients treated in public hospitals during that period.

To do that, the team looked at a range of factors, including age, sex, diagnosis, admission and discharge dates, length of stay and the cost of each hospitalization.

What did the Portuguese study find?

The results, published in a journal hosted on Wiley Online Library, showed a significant 29.4% increase in the likelihood of psychotic disorders among patients who used cannabis.

Among the hospitalizations analyzed, 12.2% of patients were cannabis users, 8.4% had mood disorders and 5% had personality disorders.

One key finding was the sharp rise in hospitalizations for psychotic disorders linked to cannabis use, which went from just 0.87% of the total in 2000 to 10.60% in 2015. These numbers underline why it's worth continuing to study the relationship between cannabis and mental health, and they give public health officials useful information for designing prevention and treatment strategies.

Who's most at risk? Breaking down the factors behind psychotic disorders

Sex turned out to be a big factor: 89.85% of the recorded cases were male patients. That lines up with statistics showing that men are the main consumers of cannabis.

As for age, the analysis found that the average age at which a psychotic episode shows up is around 30, although about 3.3% of hospitalizations involved patients under 18.

These findings back up earlier research suggesting that cannabis use could trigger psychotic disorders.

It's also worth noting that the estimated lifetime prevalence of cannabis use in Portugal is 9.75%, below the European average.

Even so, the study points to a growing trend in cannabis use in Portugal compared with other European countries, which deserves a closer look.

Why big data matters for public health

This study shows how valuable big data tools can be for researching psychotic disorders: it relied on clinical coding stored in hospital administrative databases.

Using these databases is standard practice in Portuguese public hospitals, where diagnoses and procedures are coded by highly trained medical staff, which makes the data far more reliable.

The social context matters too. Portugal was one of the first countries to decriminalize drug use, including cannabis, back in 2001: possession for personal use became an administrative matter, and criminal penalties only kick in when someone is caught with more than ten days' worth of standard doses.