There is conclusive evidence that marijuana use, particularly in early adolescence, can affect brain development. Most of the effect is on memory, attention, and executive function. How do we prevent these negative effects? Dr. Cermak's advice is: delay, delay, delay. The more success we have getting kids to delay onset of use, the more protection we provide.

While the age-old tradition of smoking cannabis remains very common, several other options for preparing the drug are becoming widely available and frequently used. In this article, we’ll update you on the modern preparations and routes of administration.

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Tourette’s disorder (TD), also known as Tourette syndrome, is a fascinating yet complex neurodevelopmental disorder that can be challenging to treat. Dr. Georges Gilles de la Tourette, a French neurologist who described the first nine cases in 1885, had it right when he described the “peculiar” symptoms as a syndrome, later reporting that “fears, phobias, and arithmomania” were part of the picture.

Dr. Greenberg works in the obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and related disorders program, and I see both kids with tics and OCD or OCD-related disorders as well as those with symptoms consistent with pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections (PANDAS) or pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome (PANS). She typically sees two to three new patients a week who fit somewhere in the OCD, tic, or PANDAS spectrum.

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Clinicians used to say, “Oh, autism is very clear. It’s the one true disorder in child psychiatry.” Now we realize that there’s a spectrum, which makes some sense, especially from a broad evolutionary perspective: If these changes were totally maladaptive, they presumably would have been lost over time; instead, they’ve persisted. That suggests that, for some people, some other combinations of these genes must be somewhat or even quite adaptive.