Increased use of the pot to send more people to the Colorado hospital



[ad_1]

Photo: Brennan Linsley (AP)

The madness of reefers is not a thing. But a new study published Tuesday is the latest, which shows that the use of cooking pots, especially for food, can sometimes cause health problems serious enough to encourage a visit to the hospital. It has been reported that Colorado residents are increasingly resorting to emergency care for cannabis-related symptoms, such as anxiety, rapid heartbeat, and a strange syndrome characterized by intense vomiting since legalization of cannabis for recreational purposes in that state.

Colorado pbaded an amendment to completely legalize cannabis in 2012 and began licensing it in 2014. The researchers responsible for the study, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, then reviewed patient medical records. having visited the emergency department of UCHealth University. Colorado Hospital from 2012 to 2016. These visits were all initially diagnosed as cannabis-related, with nearly 10,000 of these visits documented between those years.

During this period, they discovered that visits to cannabis had more than tripled. About a quarter of these visits (27%) could be directly attributed to cannabis use, they also said. And while people ended up in the hospital more often after smoking pot, pot foods were more likely to cause problems.

Preview of the miniature article
You can not OD on the pot, but powerful edible send people to the hospital

It is safe to say that the dangers of cannabis have long been overexpressed by moral crosses and …

Read more Lily

"About 10% of cannabis-related emergency visits were badociated with edible forms of weeds, but only 0.32% of total cannabis sales were for edible products," said lead author Andrew. Monte, badociate professor of emergency medicine and emergency toxicology at the University of Colorado. School Of Medicine, told NBC News. "It's 33 times higher than we expected."

Edible products also seemed to cause more serious side effects. Eighteen percent of visits to consumer products had acute psychiatric symptoms, including panic attacks or bouts of psychosis, compared to 10% of inhaled cannabis visits, for example. Edible products were also more often badociated with intoxication (48% versus 28% for the inhaled pot) and cardiovascular symptoms (8.0% vs. 3.1%).

At the same time, smoking marijuana was badociated with a higher rate of people requiring hospitalization for their symptoms. One of the main reasons was the higher incidence of Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS), a disease that causes horrible stomach pain, repeated vomiting, and the need to take showers with hot water. (those who suffer from it say that hot water soothes their symptoms).

The findings are based on visits to a single Colorado hospital, so we are not yet sure that marijuana-related emergency visits are increasing everywhere cannabis is legalized. The observational nature of the study also does not reveal whether the symptoms of someone, including psychosis, were actually caused by cannabis use, but only if the two things are related. Research has proliferated to determine whether people who are prone to mental illnesses such as schizophrenia are more likely to develop psychiatric symptoms if they consume cannabis.

That said, it is undeniable that most cannabis users will never go to the emergency room. CHS in particular is considered incredibly rare, apparently occurring only in people who consume a lot of cannabis, and its scary symptoms disappear as soon as the person stops using cannabis.

But the results suggest that the fact that people are not familiar with food products, which can take hours to work well, can cause them to take more than they should and make them sick, the researchers said. authors. They added that more needs to be done to study potential damage to edibles and cannabis in general, including its relationship to mental health issues.

[ad_2]
Source link