THC: research and patient questions

This study looked at older adults who were starting to use cannabis edible products for sleep, pain, or mood problems. Researchers checked their resting heart rate before and two hours after they ate a product, and measured THC in their blood.

Researchers followed adults living with long-term lower back pain who chose to use edible cannabis products from legal stores over a two-week period. Participants filled out daily questionnaires about their pain levels, whether they consumed their cannabis product, how many times they used it, and the estimated amounts of plant compounds they took. The goal was to see how different mixtures of major cannabis plant compounds related to daily and short-term changes in pain.

Older adults with severe shaking movements of the hands received daily oral capsules containing pharmaceutical grade plant extracts of tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol, compared against identical inactive placebo capsules in a crossover design.

This study looked at adults who drink heavily and also use cannabis regularly. Each person came to the lab on three separate days and smoked either a cannabis cigarette with no active ingredient, a weaker cigarette, or a stronger cigarette, and rated how strongly they wanted alcohol before and after.

Researchers in Toronto studied adults who use cannabis regularly and hold driver's licences. Each person sat in a driving simulator after smoking cannabis of different strengths, or a dummy product with no active ingredient, on separate days.

This is a plan for a study of adults with sickle cell disease who have long-lasting pain. Participants are randomly assigned to take a prescription synthetic form of the main active ingredient in cannabis (called dronabinol) or an inactive pill for eight weeks, and neither they nor the researchers know which one they receive.

Researchers studied 33 healthy young adults in their early twenties who used cannabis occasionally. Each person took a capsule with a moderate amount of synthetic THC (the main intoxicating ingredient in cannabis, given as a prescription form) on one visit and an inactive capsule on another, and their brain activity was scanned at rest while they were high.

Twenty healthy adults took a hemp-derived oil product that contains a substance called cannabidiol, either by mouth or rubbed onto the skin, at different times. Blood was drawn over the following day to see how much of the substance entered the body by each route.

This review pooled results from many earlier studies of a mouth spray containing two cannabis compounds, called nabiximols, in adults with multiple sclerosis. The researchers looked at whether it helped with problems other than the muscle stiffness it is already approved for, such as bladder, sleep, muscle spasms and walking.

Researchers reviewed the best available medical studies that tested cannabis-based medicines in people with a long-lasting condition that causes widespread body pain, poor sleep and tiredness. They looked at a few different versions of these medicines and compared them with dummy pills or standard painkillers.