According to a recent study, people are likely to develop diseases such as schizophrenia quite early if they smoke pot as compare to those who do not.

The study, which was published in Archives of General Psychiatry, was conducted on 8,167 people with a psychotic illness who consumed marijuana and other 14,352 people who did not. Results were alarming when it was found that pot smokers were likely to develop a psychotic disease three years earlier than non smokers.

“It is increasingly clear that marijuana is a cause of schizophrenia, and that the schizophrenia caused by cannabis starts earlier than schizophrenia with other causes,” study researcher Matthew Large of Prince of Wales Hospital in New South Wales, Australia, says in an email.

Christoph U. Correll, MD, medical director of the Recognition and Prevention Program at the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N. Y., believes that cannabis usage can lead to psychiatric disorders but at the same time a lot of people are using it and they don’t have any kind of psychiatric illness.

Marijuana is widely consumed in America as more than 16 million people are smoking it on regular basis. Experts suggest that teenagers of America are more prone to its consumption.

When asked about if the cannabis is the source or an implication, Correll stated that it is a kind of mixture of both. Some people get into using marijuana so that they can cope up with the symptoms but for most of the people, an early age start with pot can lead to psychotic illness.