• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Cannabis Users With COVID-19 More Likely To Be Hospitalized Or Need ICU Treatment

June 26, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.”

Advertisement

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.”

Advertisement

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.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Dispo launches a test to gauge user interest in selling their photos as NFTs
  2. China will buy 8,700 new airplanes over next 20 years – Boeing
  3. Australia reports 2,355 new COVID-19 cases as vaccination push continues
  4. World’s Biggest White Hydrogen Deposit May Have Been Found Under France

Source Link: Cannabis Users With COVID-19 More Likely To Be Hospitalized Or Need ICU Treatment

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • In 2016, 323 Deer Died In A Freak Lightning Strike And Taught Us A Lot About Life After Death
  • Squirting Cucumbers, World’s Least SFW Fruit, Caught Exploding On Camera
  • Ötzi The Iceman’s Ribcage Wasn’t Like Ours, But It May Have Helped Him Survive
  • Molecular “Protocells” May Form On Titan Even At More Than 100 Degrees Below Zero
  • The Blanket Octopus Has The Most Extreme Sexual Dimorphism In The Animal Kingdom
  • Brunhes-Matuyama Reversal: Listen The Earth’s Magnetic Fields Flip 780,000 Years In The Past
  • Long-Period Radio Transient Signals Puzzle Astronomers – One That’s Speeding Up May Be The Strangest Yet
  • Mariner 4: 60 Years Ago Today, NASA Changed How We Study The Solar System
  • Odd Flashes Of Light Have Been Seen On The Moon For Centuries – Some May Still Defy Explanation
  • Impact That Made Meteor Crater May Have Triggered Giant Grand Canyon Landslide
  • Get Ready, Skywatchers: A “Dazzling” Total Lunar Eclipse Is Coming In 2025
  • How A Man Won The Lottery 14 Times Using Unbelievably Basic Math
  • What Are The Amazon’s “Flying Rivers”? And Why Every Single One Of Us Relies On Them
  • Curious New Microbe With Tiny Genome Toes The Line Between Cell And Virus
  • We’ve Just Found Out Where The World’s Longest-Living Vertebrate Has Its Babies
  • For The First Time, An Animal Has Been Shown Responding To Plant-Produced Sounds
  • Deep Ocean Currents Have “Weather” And Seasonal Changes That We’re Only Just Learning About
  • Stratus: What Are The Symptoms Of The Latest COVID-19 Subvariant To Spread Around The World?
  • In 1927, Henry Ford Tried To Build A Town In The Amazon And Things Went Very, Very Badly
  • Human Botfly: Say Hello To The Parasite That Would Love To Get Under Your Skin
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version