Patients with a hospital and emergency diagnosed with cannabis use disorder – defined as inability to stop using cannabis even when the drug causes harm – died almost three times the percentage of people without disorder in the next five years A study published on Thursday, the largest on the subject.
Patients with cannabis disorder were 10 times more likely to die of suicide with those of the general population. They were also more likely to die of trauma, drug poisoning and lung cancer. These numbers indicate that cannabis disorder is about half as dangerous as opioid addiction and slightly less dangerous than alcohol use disorder, researchers said.
A second report, published on Tuesday, found that more cases of schizophrenia and psychosis in Canada have been linked to cannabis disorder since the drug was legalized.
“Many people think,” Oh, cannabis is not harmful – it is biological. It is natural. How big, “said Dr. Laura Bierut, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington Medical School in St. Louis, who is the author of a editorial who accompanies the study of the risk of death. But the marijuana sold today is much stronger and more powerful and more powerful Harmful, than Baby Boomers smoke in the 1960s and 1970s, he said.
“It’s a threat to public health just like alcohol,” Dr. Bierut said.
Recent research shows that three in 10 cannabis users will develop cannabis disorder, which are not able to stop using cannabis, although it causes serious health problems and social problems. As with alcohol, many people use marijuana entertaining without adverse effects or addiction.
The researchers took advantage of the archives in Ontario that capture millions of resident meetings with the government health system, which covers 97 % of the population there.
Of the records, scientists in Thursday’s study found 106,994 people diagnosed with cannabis disorder during a visit or emergency hospital between 2006 and 2021.
The researchers linked the files to vital statistics and found that 3.5 % of them died within five years of the treatment for the disorder. In a corresponding group of people of the same age and sex, the mortality rate was 0.6 %.
The authors then made adjustments to calculate other risk factors that may have contributed to their deaths, including mental health disorders, substance use and conditions such as heart disease and cancer.
Even when they were killed by these other causes from the equation, the researchers concluded that patients with cannabis disorder were at 2.8 times increased risk of death compared to the general population. The risk was greater in young adults aged 25 to 44 years.
Dr. Daniel Myran, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa and the first author of the study, noted that they are probably underestimating the cannabis tax.
“Our estimation is that for every person treated for CUD there are three others who did not require care,” he said. “So this is not only a cud. But quite bad that they asked for care of it.”
He also noted that the study could not definitively determine whether hemp itself increased the risk of death or if they were other lifestyles or health factors that happen to be more common among heavy hemp users.
“Either way, this team is really, really high risk, and could benefit from intervention and monitoring and prevention,” he said.
On Tuesday, the same research team published a study examining whether Canada’s recent legalization of marijuana influenced psychosis and schizophrenia rates.
The use of cannabis has been associated with the development of schizophrenia, a serious mental illness, as well as the transitional psychotic episodes characterized by loss of contact with reality. Some studies have found no correlation between cannabis legalization and the increase in these disorders, but many studies are too small to detect changes in the prevalence of psychotic disorders, which are rare.
The new study analyzed the psychosis associated with cannabis in Canada during three periods: before the country he did legal cannabis (2006 to 2015), amid expansion of medical and non-medical cannabis (2015-2018) and after entertainment Hemp was used legal (2018 to 2022).
Schizophrenia rates were constant over time. However, the percentage of cases due to cannabis use disorder increased to 10.3 % during the legalization period, from 3.7 % before legalization, according to the authors. The rate of psychosis (no diagnosis of schizophrenia) almost doubled after legalization.
Young adults aged 19 to 24 were more vulnerable, said Jodi Gilman, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who wrote a comment on the study.
“This is a period of life when the brain is still growing and is still vulnerable to the effects of cannabis,” Dr. Gilman said. Psychosis and schizophrenia are also known to develop in young adulthood, he added: “So you have a double blow”.
