New Research Identifies Risks of Cannabis Use

Shared from the CADCA blog post.

Two alarming studies were released recently that highlight the association between cannabis use and serious health concerns.

One study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, analyzed the information from over 4.6 million individual health records and found that cannabis users were six times more likely to experience a heart attack. Additionally, users of the drug were at a four times greater risk of an ischemic stroke and two times greater risk of experiencing heart failure. The study reported that “cannabis use appears to pose a substantial and independent risk for those outcomes, even in a population without traditional cardiovascular risk factors.”

An additional study, released in JAMA Psychiatry, scanned the brain of 61 individuals, 25 of whom had been diagnosed with cannabis use disorder. The study, which looked for darker regions in the brain which indicate incidents of dopamine levels rising too high, found a direct linkage between increased cannabis use and larger black spots on the brain. The author stated, “in people partaking in excess cannabis use, those spots are blacker than what they should be for their age compared to healthy individuals…in some cases [their brains] are showing pigments someone 10 years older would have.”

These black spots can be means for concern. Author Ali Kahn stated that they observed “an increase of blacker spots in a particular region of the midbrain associated with psychosis…[It] was seen in those with cannabis use disorder regardless of whether they have first-episode schizophrenia.”