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A new study has found that marijuana use dramatically increases a person’s risk of dying from heart disease, heart attacks and stroke. It was no small study either. It involved the medical data of around 200 million people.
According to the study which was published recently in the journal Heart, marijuana use doubled the risk of dying from heart disease in the people studied, a majority of which were between the ages of 19 and 59.
The study found that people who used cannabis also had a 29% higher risk for heart attacks and a 20% higher risk for stroke. The data used for the study was pooled from 17 cross-sectional studies, six cohort studies, and one case-control study.
“What was particularly striking was that the concerned patients hospitalized for these disorders were young (and thus, not likely to have their clinical features due to tobacco smoking) and with no history of cardiovascular disorder or cardiovascular risk factors,” senior author Emilie Jouanjus, an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Toulouse, France, told CNN.
In a linked editorial, Professor of Medicine Stanton Glantz and Dr. Lynn Silver from the University of California at San Francisco, wrote, “Given the high and growing prevalence of use and especially of frequent use, cannabis has the potential to further aggravate the recent reversal in the historical decline of 60% in US death rates from cardiovascular disease since the 1950s.”
The experts added, “Cannabis needs to be incorporated into the framework for prevention of clinical cardiovascular disease. So too must cardiovascular disease prevention be incorporated into the regulation of cannabis markets. Effective product warnings and education on risks must be developed, required and implemented. Cardiovascular and other health risks must be considered in the regulation of allowable product and marketing design as the evidence base grows. Today that regulation is focused on establishing the legal market with woeful neglect of minimizing health risks. Specifically, cannabis should be treated like tobacco: not criminalized but discouraged, with protection of bystanders from secondhand exposure.”
As Dr. Beth Cohen, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told CNN, “When you burn something, whether it is tobacco or cannabis, it creates toxic compounds, carcinogens, and particulate matter that are harmful to health.”
That doesn’t mean edibles laced with THC are necessarily risk-free though. “We found that vascular function was reduced by 42% in marijuana smokers and by 56% in THC-edible users compared to nonusers,” Dr. Leila Mohammadi, an assistant researcher in cardiology at the University of California, San Francisco, also told CNN.