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CNN: PHI’s Lynn Silver Discusses New Study Connecting Cannabis and Cardiovascular Diseases
A growing body of evidence suggests that cannabis use may be linked to significant health harms, including cardiovascular disease. In CNN, Lynn Silver, MD, MPH, Director of PHI’s Getting it Right from the Start, discusses the need for clinicians to screen people for cannabis use and educate them about the harms.
- CNN Health
“Using marijuana doubles the risk of dying from heart disease, according to a new analysis of pooled medical data involving 200 million people mostly between the ages of 19 and 59.
“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,” said senior author Émilie Jouanjus, an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Toulouse, France, in an email.
“Getting this right is critically important because cardiovascular disease is the top cause of death both in the United States and globally,” said Silver, who is also senior adviser at the Public Health Institute, a nonprofit public health organization that analyzes marijuana policy and legalization.
Silver is the coauthor of an editorial published with the paper that calls for change in how cannabis is viewed by health professionals, regulatory bodies and the public at large.
Clinicians need to screen people for cannabis use and educate them about its harms, the same way we do for tobacco, because in some population groups it’s being used more widely than tobacco. Our regulatory system, which has been almost entirely focused on creating legal infrastructure and licensing legal, for-profit (cannabis) businesses, needs to focus much more strongly on health warnings that educate people about the real risks.Lynn Silver, MD, MPH
Director, Getting it Right from the Start, Public Health Institute
The dangers of smoke (and maybe edibles)
The new systematic review and meta-analysis analyzed medical information from large, observational studies conducted in Australia, Egypt, Canada, France, Sweden and the US between 2016 and 2023.
Those studies did not ask people how they used cannabis — such as via smoking, vaping, dabbing, edibles, tinctures or topicals. (Dabbing involves vaporizing concentrated cannabis and inhaling the vapor.) However, “based on epidemiological data, it is likely that cannabis was smoked in the vast majority of cases,” Jouanjus said.
Smoking tobacco is a well-known cause of heart disease — both the smoke and the chemicals in tobacco damage blood vessels and increase clotting, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Therefore, it is not surprising that smoking, vaping or dabbing cannabis could do the same, Silver said: “Any of the many ways of inhaling cannabis are going to have risks to the user, and there’s also secondhand smoke risks, which are similar to tobacco.”
Click on the link below to read the full article.
Read the Heart Editorial: "It Is Time to Treat Cannabis as an Important Risk Factor for Cardiovascular Disease"
This editorial, co-written by Stanton A. Glantz, PhD and PHI’s Lynn Silver, MD, MPH and published in Heart, reviews a new meta-analysis of 24 recent studies, showing significantly increased risk of cardiovascular events among cannabis users.
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Originally published by CNN Health
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