Medical Marijuana and High Blood Pressure Patients

April 8, 2021

A new study suggests that anyone who smokes marijuana faces a threefold risk of dying from 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. “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 at GUS, said in a statement. For her paper, published Wednesday in the where they looked at more than 1,800 people age 21 or older who had been recruited previously as part of a large and ongoing national health survey. In 2008, researchers asked them whether they had ever used marijuana or hashish. People who answered “yes” were classified as marijuana users; those who answered “no” were classified as nonusers.

 

If you or someone you know is suffering from High Blood Pressure, please contact the experts at one of All Natural Health Certifications www.edocmmj.com’s many Florida medical marijuana locations. We can help you get your medical marijuana card and doctor certification all in one quick and easy visit. Contact us know to see if you qualify for a medical card and to schedule an appointment. (800) 303-9916.

 

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.”

 

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 use may increase the risk for hypertension mortality.”

 

Related News: Research and Study Information

 

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 500 in marijuana, including THC and CBD can differ drastically says one prominent medical marijuana doctor in Florida. While the study is far from conclusive, it sheds light on an important potential health risk linked with marijuana use. Scientists and researchers know that cannabis affects the heart, but because of the limited research available on the drug, it has been hard to figure 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 30 and 60 beats a minute for anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours. A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found “insufficient evidence” to support or refute the idea that medical marijuana 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.

 

If you or someone you know is suffering from High Blood Pressure, please contact the experts at one of All Natural Health Certifications www.edocmmj.com’s many Florida medical marijuana locations. We can help you get your medical marijuana card and doctor certification all in one quick and easy visit. Contact us know to see if you qualify for a medical card and to schedule an appointment. (800) 303-9916.