Marijuana use dramatically increases risk of death from heart attacks, stroke - New study

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.

Compared to nonusers, those who used cannabis also had a 29% higher risk for heart attacks and a 20 per cent higher risk for stroke, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal Heart. 

“This is one of the largest studies to date on the connection between marijuana and heart disease, and it raises serious questions about the assumption that cannabis imposes little cardiovascular risk,” said pediatrician Dr. Lynn Silver, a clinical professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco. 

“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,” she said. 

“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.” 

The dangers of smoke 

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.” 

The notion that smoking cannabis is less harmful because it’s “natural” is just wrong, Dr. Beth Cohen, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told CNN in a prior interview. 

“When you burn something, whether it is tobacco or cannabis, it creates toxic compounds, carcinogens, and particulate matter that are harmful to health,” Cohen said in an email.