An increasing number of studies are showing that marijuana may not be so harmless after all.
In two new studies, to be presented later this month at the American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions 2023, researchers found that regular marijuana use increased the risk of heart attack, stroke or heart failure — even after factors like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity were taken into account.
“Prior research shows links between marijuana use and cardiovascular disease like coronary artery disease, heart failure and atrial fibrillation, which is known to cause heart failure,” lead study author Yakubu Bene-Alhasan, M.D., MPH, a resident physician at Medstar Health in Baltimore, said in a statement. “Marijuana use isn’t without its health concerns, and our study provides more data linking its use to cardiovascular conditions.”
This is a confusing report and kind of one that misses some key points that I’d want to see investigated in more detail were I to be reviewing a paper like this.
For one, THC is not only taken by smoking it, but without seeing the conference posters this is based on I cannot see how they have controlled for that. I assume they haven’t as they relied specifically on already present medical data which they themselves note is possibly miscoded between hospitals.
In all honesty smoking anything will likely increase these factors because, well, smoke is full of some fairly nasty stuff.
Additionally they specifically chose people for the study classified as having a cannabis misuse disorder. These will be approximately the worst case scenario.
I dunno, it just seems to miss out a lot of detail that I think is very important for understanding this question clearly and the articles about it are not querying that point at all.
Yeah, smoking anything isn’t good for you.
And they didn’t even try to quantity how much someone uses. An edible on weekends and 4-5 blunts a day are vastly different things.
My first question when seeing studies like this: is what they are studying just a proxy for socioeconomic status? My follow-up question (when the study is in the US): did they control for having/not having health insurance? (no, the answer to this is always no)
[edit: to be clear, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t use marijuana, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had negative health effects. But I also take studies like this with a grain of salt.]
Where are the links to the studies referenced in the article?
This looks like a summary of the real article which they linked to here where there is at least the author names and more details
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Looking forward to read the actual studies as it’s a really interesting topic. One of the limitations cited is that they didn’t control for the method of cannabis ingestion (inhaling vs eating).
I hope we’ll get further studies focusing on the various methods of consuming cannabis and the effects on health.
I might have missed some parts, but did the risk only occur for frequent smokers? (And how did they define frequent)
Didn’t something else come out recently debunking the claim Marijuana is associated with increased risk of heart attack?
