There have been questions over how cannabis use might affect someone’s risk of severe disease if they catch COVID-19, but a new study claims to be able to address some of the confusion. It seems clear that cannabis use is as risky as smoking when it comes to COVID, with people who used the drug at least once in the year prior to contracting the virus being significantly more likely to require hospital treatment.
The study, from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looked at the health records of 72,501 people who were treated for COVID-19 at clinics within a large Midwest healthcare system in a two-year period between 2020 and 2022.
The data showed that people who said they’d used any form of cannabis during the preceding year before catching COVID were 80 percent more likely to require hospitalization and 27 percent more likely to need intensive care treatment than those who had not used cannabis. This was after adjusting for factors like vaccination status and other health conditions.
As a risk factor for severe disease, this put cannabis use on a par with smoking tobacco.
“There’s this sense among the public that cannabis is safe to use, that it’s not as bad for your health as smoking or drinking, that it may even be good for you. I think that’s because there hasn’t been as much research on the health effects of cannabis as compared to tobacco or alcohol,” said senior author Professor Li-Shiun Chen in a statement.
“What we found is that cannabis use is not harmless in the context of COVID-19. People who reported yes to current cannabis use, at any frequency, were more likely to require hospitalization and intensive care than those who did not use cannabis.”
While cannabis was associated with more severe COVID-19 symptoms, it did differ from smoking in one important way. There’s not yet enough evidence to show that cannabis use is associated with increased risk of death, whereas for smoking the link is clear: smokers are significantly more likely to die from COVID than nonsmokers.
Some previous research had suggested that cannabis may provide some sort of protective effect against viruses like SARS-CoV-2, but these data from real-world patients do not support that hypothesis.
“Most of the evidence suggesting that cannabis is good for you comes from studies in cells or animals,” Chen explained. “The advantage of our study is that it is in people and uses real-world health-care data collected across multiple sites over an extended time period. All the outcomes were verified: hospitalization, ICU stay, death.”
“Using this data set, we were able to confirm the well-established effects of smoking, which suggests that the data are reliable.”
While it looks as though cannabis use worsens outcomes from COVID-19, we’re still not clear on why that may be. The authors suggested a few theories, such as damage to lung tissue from smoking cannabis or a dampening effect on the immune system. It’s also not clear whether the way in which someone consumes cannabis makes a difference.
“We just don’t know whether edibles are safer,” said first author and medical resident Dr Nicholas Griffith. “People were asked a yes-or-no question: ‘Have you used cannabis in the past year?’ That gave us enough information to establish that if you use cannabis, your health-care journey will be different, but we can’t know how much cannabis you have to use, or whether it makes a difference whether you smoke it or eat edibles.”
He added, “I hope this study opens the door to more research on the health effects of cannabis.”
The study is published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Source Link: Cannabis Users With COVID-19 More Likely To Be Hospitalized Or Need ICU Treatment
