A new study suggests that anyone who smokes marijuana faces risks of high blood pressure than people who have never used the drug.
Those findings sound alarming, but it’s important to keep in mind that, like any study, this one has limitations, including that it defines marijuana “users” as anyone who’s ever tried the drug and that it doesn’t differentiate among strains of a highly unregulated product.
However, the study highlights some key areas for future study — including how using cannabis might affect the heart. Here’s what you need to know.
‘A greater than three-fold risk of death’
“We found that marijuana users had a greater than three-fold risk of death from hypertension and the risk increased with each additional year of use,the lead author of the study and a doctoral student of epidemiology and biostatistics, said in a statement.
For her paper, published Wednesday in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, They looked at more than 1,200 people age 20 or older who had been recruited previously as part of a large and ongoing national health survey.
In 2005, researchers asked them whether they had ever used marijuana or hashish. People who answered “yes” were classified as marijuana doctors in florida and users; those who answered “no” were classified as nonusers.
The researchers then merged that data with statistics on death from all causes, pulled from the US National Center for Health Statistics, and adjusted it to rule out any factors that could muddle the results, like gender, race, and a history of smoking tobacco.
Overall, those classified as marijuana users were found to be 3.42 times as likely to die from hypertension, or high blood pressure, than those who said they had never used. That risk also appeared to rise by a factor of 1.04 with what the researchers labeled “each year of use.”
Here’s the problem: The study’s authors defined anyone who said they had ever tried marijuana as a “regular user.”
Other research suggests this is a poor assumption. According to a recent survey, about 52% of Americans have tried cannabis at some point, yet only 14% said they used the drug “regularly,” defined as “at least once a month.”
Also, the study was observational, meaning it followed a group of people over time and reported what happened to them, so the researchers cannot conclude a cause and effect — they can’t say that smoking marijuana causes high blood pressure, only that the two things appear to be linked. The authors wrote, “From our results, marijuana cards in florida use may increase the risk for hypertension mortality.”
Another issue is the unregulated nature of the existing, and largely illegal, cannabis market. People are using a wide variety of strains whose concentrations of compounds — there are up to 400 in florida marijuana doctors, including THC and CBD — can differ drastically.
Charles Pollack, who directs the Lambert Center for the Study of Medicinal Cannabis and was not involved with the new study, told LiveScience that there were many strains of marijuana “with no quality standards,” and that was “making it tough to generalize” the effects.
Marijuana and your heart
While the study is far from conclusive, it sheds light on an important potential health risk linked with marijuana use. Scientists know that cannabis affects the heart, but because of the limited research available on the drug, it has been hard to suss out how it affects things like high blood pressure.
For example, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, ingesting marijuana increases heart rate by between 20 and 50 beats a minute for anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours.
But a large, recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found “insufficient evidence” to support or refute the idea that cannabis might increase the overall risk of a heart attack, though it also found some limited evidence that using the drug could be a trigger for the phenomenon.
When it comes to cannabis’ effect on blood pressure, the results are also inconclusive. One very small study, for example, found a sharp increase in blood pressure immediately after regular pot users stopped using the drug.
“Abrupt cessation of heavy cannabis use may cause clinically significant increases in blood pressure in a subset of users,” that study’s researchers wrote.
And according to the Mayo Clinic, using cannabis could result in decreased, not increased blood pressure.
Marijuana’s official designation as a Schedule 1 drug — something with “no currently accepted medical use” — means it’s pretty tough to study.
Yet both a growing body of research and numerous anecdotal reports link cannabis with several health benefits, including pain relief and helping with certain forms of epilepsy. In addition, researchers say there are many other ways marijuana might affect health that they want to better understand.
A massive new report released in January by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and medical marijuana doctors in florida helps sum up exactly what we know — and, perhaps more important, what we don’t know — about the science of weed.
One of weed’s active ingredients, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, interacts with our brain’s reward system, the part that has been primed to respond to things that make us feel good, like eating and sex.
When overexcited by drugs, the reward system creates feelings of euphoria. This is also why some studies have suggested that excessive marijuana use can be a problem in some people — the more often you trigger that euphoria, the less you may feel during other rewarding experiences.
Within a few minutes of inhaling marijuana, your heart rate can increase by between 20 and 50 beats a minute. This can last anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The new report found insufficient evidence to support or refute the idea that cannabis might increase the overall risk of a heart attack. The same report, however, also found some limited evidence that smoking could be a trigger for a heart attack.
Pot also contains cannabidiol, or CBD — and this chemical, while not responsible for getting you high, is thought to be responsible for many of marijuana’s therapeutic effects such as pain relief or potentially treating certain kinds of childhood epilepsy.
The new report also found conclusive or substantial evidence — the most definitive levels — that florida medical marijuana doctors and cannabis can be an effective treatment for chronic pain, which could have to do with both CBD and THC. Pain is also “by far the most common” reason people request medical marijuana, according to the report.
One of the ways scientists think it may help with pain is by reducing inflammation, a component of painful illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis.
A preliminary 2005 study of 58 patients with RA, roughly half of whom were given a placebo and roughly half of whom were given a cannabis-based medicine called Sativex, found “statistically significant improvements in pain on movement, pain at rest, quality of sleep” for patients on Sativex.
Other studies testing both other cannabinoid products and inhaled marijuana have shown similar pain-relieving effects, according to the report.
Some people with inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis could also benefit from marijuana use, studies suggest.
A 2014 paper, for example, describes two studies of people with chronic Crohn’s in which half were given the drug and half were given a placebo. That study showed a decrease in symptoms in 10 of 11 subjects using cannabis, compared with just four of 10 on the placebo. But when the researchers did a follow-up study using low-dose CBD, they saw no effect in the patients.
A drug called Epidiolex, which contains CBD, may be on its way to becoming the first of its kind to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of rare forms of childhood epilepsy.
The company that makes it, GW Pharma, is exploring CBD for its potential use in people with Dravet syndrome, a rare form of childhood-onset epilepsy that is associated with multiple types of seizures.
In March, the company came out with phase three trial data that showed the drug had some positive results.
Researchers say that, for now, we need more research before we’ll know whether cannabis can help with these diseases.
It may throw off your balance, as it influences activity in the cerebellum and basal ganglia, two brain areas that help regulate balance, coordination, reaction time, and posture.
Feeling as if time is sped up or slowed down is one of the most commonly reported effects of using marijuana. A 2012 paper sought to draw some more solid conclusions from some of the studies on those anecdotal reports, but it was unable to do so.
“Even though 70% of time estimation studies report overestimation, the findings of time production and time reproduction studies remain inconclusive,” the paper said.
In a 1998 study that used magnetic resonance imaging to focus on the brains of volunteers on THC, the authors noted that many had altered blood flow to the cerebellum, which most likely fort lauderdale marijuana doctors play a role in our sense of time.
Limitations on what sort of marijuana research is allowed make it particularly difficult to study this sort of effect.
A case of the munchies is no figment of the imagination — both casual and heavy marijuana users tend to overeat when they smoke.
Marijuana may effectively flip a circuit in the brain that is normally responsible for quelling the appetite, triggering us to eat instead, according to a recent study of mice.
It all comes down to a special group of cells in the brain that are normally activated after we have eaten a big meal to tell us we’ve had enough. The psychoactive ingredient in weed appears to activate just one component of those appetite-suppressing cells, making us feel hungry rather than satisfied.
Sarasota Marijuana Doctors say that weed can mess with your memory by changing the way your brain processes information, but scientists still aren’t sure exactly how this happens. Still, several studies suggest that weed interferes with short-term memory, and researchers tend to see more of these effects in inexperienced or infrequent users than in heavy, frequent users.
Importantly, in most cases, saying cannabis is connected to an increased risk doesn’t mean marijuana use caused that risk.
Scientists can’t say for sure whether florida medical marijuana causes depression or depressed people are simply more likely to smoke. But one study from the Netherlands suggests that smoking weed could raise the risk of depression for young people who already have a special serotonin gene that could make them more vulnerable to depression.
Those findings are bolstered by which found moderate evidence that cannabis use was linked to a small increased risk of depression.