Study finds cannabis use associated with higher risk of heart attack in young adults

[tobedetermined]

No doubt we will be hearing a lot about this study & the results . . .

From CTV News

"while risk of heart attack among young cannabis users is low overall, their findings suggest those younger than 45 were nearly twice as likely to have had a heard attack than non-users.

Researchers looked at data from a survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that included more than 33,000 adults aged 18 to 44, with 17 per cent of them reporting cannabis use in the past 30 days."

"A history of heart attack was associated with more frequent cannabis use, the study said, while less frequent cannabis use was associated with "elevated, albeit nonsignificant" risk.

The cross-sectional study found the association between cannabis use and heart attacks was consistent across different forms of consumption, including smoking, vaping and eating edibles.

"Really what we wanted to do was look at a dataset that was generalizable to a larger population," Ladha said. "We were able to look at the frequency of use and show that how frequently you used it was actually associated with your risk of having a heart attack."

The study found cannabis users were also more likely to be male, smoke cigarettes, use e-cigarettes and be heavy alcohol drinkers, which may also contribute to their risk of heart attack.

But researchers said their analysis adjusted for those risk factors and others and the results were "still consistent.""

 

[Drewsif]

Was this study done on indica or Sativa bro

They probably used a lighter instead of a hemp wick,and didn't give thanks to lord ganja before taking a hit. That's what killed Frenchy Canoli.

 

[Mithridate]

Water can be extremely dangerous. A recent study shows that nearly 100% of people who died of crack overdose had drank it less than 10 days before their death.
the more you know..

 

[Sub24ox7]

Lol at this really seems like reaching really hard to find bad outcomes. I have smoked weed my whole life and I took 1 gram of rso daily for 3 years while training to run miles which I can do now in 6 minutes flat and I’m in he best shape of my life. I run up to 5 miles a day and lift weights daily. You couldn’t stop my heart. Although that’s why my grandfather made it 2 weeks without food during hospice he had such a strong heart it would not stop beating.
Sorry for the rambling. I just don’t see it and anyway if you read further it was like a risk of .8 percent versus 1.6 percent.
Unfortunately it seems research is still skewed toward harms.
Lol what’s risk difference of heart attack for a young city smoker versus non smoker.
Lol ok I see the bold text in first post. Of course as follows:
The study found cannabis users were also more likely to be male, smoke cigarettes, use e-cigarettes and be heavy alcohol drinkers, which may also contribute to their risk of heart attack.


lol some study

 

[armedoldhippy]

i have heard/read for years (and experienced it myself) that cannabis can boost your heart rate noticeably. fuck, SOMETHING is gonna kill you, right? might as well be good pot, or bacon, something you like.

 

[Mithridate]

Okok my last answer was a bit trollish, so..

Nature and equilibrium
The human body will seek health as surely as water will seek its own level.

If you remove that which overloads the body, it will automatically return to health. Every body has a baseline amount of toxin you can intake, that the body will take care of without much effort. But once critical levels of toxicity are reached, poor health ensues.

The body can no more maintain health, until it can overcome its burden. Once in desiquilibrium, just about anything other than perfectly healthy food/habits will be a contributor to poor health.

The study mentions alcool and smoking but no mention of diet or excersise, which lead me to believe that the test subject could of been unfit for the purpose of the study to begin with.

 

[Switcher56]

i have heard/read for years (and experienced it myself) that cannabis can boost your heart rate noticeably. fuck, SOMETHING is gonna kill you, right? might as well be good pot, or bacon, something you like.

LOL!

 

[hyposomniac]

Okok my last answer was a bit trollish, so..

Nature and equilibrium
The human body will seek health as surely as water will seek its own level.

If you remove that which overloads the body, it will automatically return to health. Every body has a baseline amount of toxin you can intake, that the body will take care of without much effort. But once critical levels of toxicity are reached, poor health ensues.

The body can no more maintain health, until it can overcome its burden. Once in desiquilibrium, just about anything other than perfectly healthy food/habits will be a contributor to poor health.

The study mentions alcool and smoking but no mention of diet or excersise, which lead me to believe that the test subject could of been unfit for the purpose of the study to begin with.

I gotta admit, the more pot I have, the less I exercise and the more crap I eat.

 

[Chi13]

Lol at this really seems like reaching really hard to find bad outcomes. I have smoked weed my whole life and I took 1 gram of rso daily for 3 years while training to run miles which I can do now in 6 minutes flat and I’m in he best shape of my life. I run up to 5 miles a day and lift weights daily. You couldn’t stop my heart. Although that’s why my grandfather made it 2 weeks without food during hospice he had such a strong heart it would not stop beating.
Sorry for the rambling. I just don’t see it and anyway if you read further it was like a risk of .8 percent versus 1.6 percent.
Unfortunately it seems research is still skewed toward harms.
Lol what’s risk difference of heart attack for a young city smoker versus non smoker.
Lol ok I see the bold text in first post. Of course as follows:
The study found cannabis users were also more likely to be male, smoke cigarettes, use e-cigarettes and be heavy alcohol drinkers, which may also contribute to their risk of heart attack.


lol some study

Yes and it also said "But researchers said their analysis adjusted for those risk factors and others and the results were "still consistent.""

Just because you are fit and healthy does not mean that the study is wrong. It's a study about risks in a population, not an individual. I am also in good shape due to taking care of my lifestyle through diet and exercise, but none of this discounts the study findings.

 

[Sub24ox7]

It’s hard to take studies about cannabis seriously given the history of studies only looking for harm.
I am very dismissive when I see them. I’m sure things are changing finally. I will admit I didn’t read it thoroughly because of my bias, so I will reread it.

 

[Sub24ox7]

I gotta admit, the more pot I have, the less I exercise and the more crap I eat.

When I eat sativa rso like o. Haze and it’s hybrids I get sped up and have more energy and run farther. Everybody is different( I really mostly use very sativa cultivars). Maybe I should smoke some indica or eat some indica rso I need to relax more heh.

 

[Mithridate]

Emphasis are mine
​​​​​(parenthesis) are mostly mine. Some farther down are not.



From the paper
"Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study* using pooled data from the 2017 and 2018 cohorts of the American Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey of US adults. We analyzed the association between any *recent cannabis use*(last 30 days) and history of MI using a weighted logistic regression model that adjusted (lol) for demographic factors(?), socioeconomic factors(?), health-related behaviours, concomitant substance(excluding any illicit drugs) use and other comorbidities. We also assessed this association after stratifying by frequency of use and by primary method of consumption"

Ps: I did not look at the surveys list of question, could be gems in there.

​​But what is a cross-sectional study?

Definitions: A cross-sectional study involves looking at data from a population at one specific point in time (not over time). The participants in this type of study are selected based on particular variables of interest. (Ie weed and MI)

Cross-sectional studies are observational in nature and are known as descriptive research, not causal or relational, meaning that you can't use them to determine the cause of something, such as a disease. Researchers record the information that is present in a population, but they do not manipulate variables. ("adjusted" lol)

This type of research can be used to describe characteristics that exist in a community, but not to determine cause-and-effect relationships between different variables. This method is often used to make inferences about possible relationships or to gather preliminary data to support further research and experimentation.
(a.k.a funding)

Gems from the paper, this the fun part

” We defined any recent cannabis use as using cannabis 1 or more time during the past 30 days."

"The primary outcome was history of MI, which we defined as a “yes” response to the question: “Has a doctor, nurse, or other health professional ever told you that you had any of the following? … (Ever told) you had a heart attack, also called a myocardial infarction?”
(The papers omits OTHER diseases or symptoms which would prompt a "yes" answer)

"Ethics approval
The study protocol was deemed exempt from ethics review, as BRFSS data sets are publicly available"

"We were unable to differentiate between participants who began using cannabis before having an MI, and those who began using cannabis after having an MI."
(my favorite)

"In our primary analysis of recent cannabis use assessed as a binary outcome, a history of MI was reported by 61 of 4610 cannabis users (1.3%) and 240 of 28 563 nonusers (0.8%) (risk difference 0.5%)" *4.6k vs 28.5k*
​
"Similarly, a higher odds of history of MI was observed with vapourization as a primary method of cannabis consumption and other forms of cannabis consumption, including edibles, when compared with nonusers; however, these were not statistically significant." (Really? lol.)



Competing interests: Karim Ladha and Hance Clarke are principal investigators of an observational medical cannabis study funded by Shoppers Drug Mart. Subodh Verma is President of the Canadian Medical and Surgical Knowledge Translation Research Group, a federally incorporated not-for-profit physician organization, and reports research grants and/or speaking honoraria from Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Amgen, Sanofi, Servier, Sun Pharmaceuticals, HLS Therapeutics, Amarin, Valeant, Bayer, PhaseBio and Pfizer. C. David Mazer reports consulting fees from Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim and Octapharma.

No other competing interests were declared.

 

[f-e]

Once in the last 30 days, says that smoking once a month doubles the risk. It really falls apart there.

What they have done, is not find smokers, but cainers. I didn't need to read on to where it admits most were heavy drinkers. I already knew it's not the green, it's the cainer lifestyle. It's really simple. You take things that alter you and your system steps up the filtering. Your filters and pump suffer.

No way to blame green when it's a load of cainers who have had some once in the last month. You just can't filter the results with other studies that were likely as poorly done. Did the drinks companies fund this? lol

 

[Mithridate]

f-e I read the paper and found some gems such as :
"We were unable to differentiate between participants who began using cannabis before having an MI, and those who began using cannabis after having an MI."
(my favorite)

edit: also to validate their research they looked at blindness against the same set of data. They found that more people who used in the last month had had an MI than blind people who used in the last month.
​​​​
so MI>blindness = weed kills, baby

 

[Rider420]

Don't you love how reefer madness propaganda gets recycled every ten years. Another study along these lines were disproved ten years ago. Same old reefer madness no prof just vague threats about what it might do.

 

[Sub24ox7]

As I thought more reefer madness! I knew it! Correlation doesn’t equal causation. Looks like it was a very poor study indeed.

 

[HempKat]

This is the problem with most studies, if you define the goal of what you are looking for first, you can tailor most any study to give you the results you want. Clearly the over representation of competing interests (big pharma) informs one that the goal was to find a negative result. The way they went about gathering the data clearly demonstrates (at least in my opinion) a negative bias seeking to find negative results. The way I see it if the goal is to find any real impact of cannabis use (if any) requires a much more broad and comprehensive study that looks at many other non cannabis related lifestyle behaviors. I've seen nothing in what has been presented that for example factored in diet. What if all the cannabis users indulged in a carb heavy diet satisfying their "munchies" and yet the non cannabis users not being subjected to "munchies" ate a more healthy low carb diet? The results they obtained would make perfect sense in that circumstance and yet have little direct connection to the cannabis use. That's just the easy low hanging fruit of examples that could throw a study like this. Their are many lifestyle changes in society that are fairly new (within the last two decades) that could seriously throw this study off in a big way. A cliché type phrase one hears more an more these days is "Sitting is the new smoking" meaning a sedentary lifestyle can be just as bad for you as smoking. With modern technology bring automation more and more into every day life and things like food delivery service becoming so popular so that you can continue to sit in front of your tv, computer or game console without having to do much of anything to feed your face, these are lifestyle impacts that are not fully understood or evaluated yet. When you look at the increase in heart disease, obesity, high cholesterol, diabetes and many other major health problems over time, you see a nice corresponding relationship between these health issues and the point in time were we began to exercise less, eat more highly processed low nutritional content food then we used to do back in the days when these health problems were much more rare then they are now.

According to the Mayo clinic the leading cause of heart attacks is: "A buildup of fatty plaques in your arteries (atherosclerosis) is the most common cause of coronary artery disease. Unhealthy lifestyle habits, such as a poor diet, lack of exercise, being overweight and smoking, can lead to atherosclerosis.

As long as a study looking to evaluate the relationship between cannabis and heart attacks does not screen out the lifestyle habits listed above then it is virtually impossible to know the impact of just cannabis use alone.

 

[Treevly]

I recall reading an epidemiological study from Colorado some time ago, regarding heart attacks. Someone wanted to know which behaviours triggered heart attacks, so they contacted all the hospitals in the state which have emergency rooms, and asked: of the patients who came to your ER and presented with heart attacks, what were the most common triggers for the attack, in the cases where a trigger could be determined. (Mind you, this is the state where the L.A. movie/TV and music types go after they've made their $$$.) After the data was collected, the the top 3 most common triggers appeared to be: (1) cocaine; (2) eating a heavy meal; (3) smoking a joint. I was surprised by #2.

It's well established that smoking a pot cranks blood pressure up, it's part of getting stoned. That's probably what triggers the heart attacks (and strokes.) If someone is young and healthy and strong, the spike probably won't matter, but for older or less healthy people, it may be somewhat risky.

Harvard says: ""One of the few things scientists know for sure about marijuana and cardiovascular health is that people with established heart disease who are under stress develop chest pain more quickly if they have been smoking marijuana than they would have otherwise. This is because of complex effects cannabinoids have on the cardiovascular system, including raising resting heart rate, dilating blood vessels, and making the heart pump harder. Research suggests that the risk of heart attack is several times higher in the hour after smoking marijuana than it would be normally. While this does not pose a significant threat to people who have minimal cardiovascular risk, it should be a red flag for anyone with a history of heart disease. Although the evidence is weaker, there are also links to a higher risk of atrial fibrillation or ischemic stroke immediately following marijuana use. Consistent with these links, studies by Dr. Mukamal and colleagues also suggest that marijuana smoking may increase the long-term death rate among heart attack survivors.""
FROM: ' Marijuana and heart health: What you need to know. Access to marijuana is growing, but marijuana benefits and its risks have not been carefully studied.'

 

[Subu]

I honestly don't even care at this stage, happy to pay the price.

 

[armedoldhippy]

"increase the long-term death rate"...what, does that mean we're gonna die more than once? WTF? lol...i;m with you, Subu.