People suffering from migraine are using cannabis for relief, to reduce the intensity of their pain symptoms, new research reveals. The study conducted by a Singapore-based company Healint involved 9,885 people from the US and Canada.
Cannabis used to relieve migraine pain
Through its migraine-tracking app, Migraine Buddy, Healint collected data from patients, which revealed that 30 percent of migraine patients in the US had used cannabis for relief migraine pain. Out of those, 82 percent said cannabis helped them reduce their level of pain.
According to a press release done on September 23, the health care technology company revealed that 40 million Americans suffer from “disabling migraine attacks.” Healint referred to a study published in The Journal of Pain in November 2019. The researchers found that inhaling marijuana reduced the severity of migraines and headaches in patients by nearly 50 percent.
Francois Cadiou is Healint’s CEO and co-founder. Regarding the outcome of the study, he said:
Cannabis is becoming a prominent treatment option for chronic pain patients, especially for migraineurs. With more and more states across the United States legalizing medical marijuana, migraine patients are becoming acquainted with cannabis as a natural remedy that can help alleviate migraines and even prevent them. Research about the benefits of cannabis use among migraine patients is slowly emerging, but more must be done to properly inform individuals about the use and dosage of medical marijuana to treat migraines.
Marijuana for menopause
In a similar development, a new study shows that an increasing number of women either use marijuana or want to use it to manage menopause symptoms. A survey entitled Midlife Veterans Health Survey involved 232 women in Northern California.
More than half of the women with a mean age of 55.95 reported annoying menopause symptoms. The symptoms included hot flashes and night sweats, insomnia, and genitourinary signs. According to the North American Menopause Society, about 27 percent of the women sampled said they had used or were currently using marijuana to alleviate their symptoms.
Another 10 percent of the participants showed interest in trying marijuana to manage their menopause symptoms in the future. Contrastingly, only 19 percent of the sampled women said they used or were using a more traditional type of menopause symptom management, like hormone therapy.
These findings suggest that cannabis use to manage menopause symptoms may be relatively common. However, we do not know whether cannabis use is safe or effective for menopause symptom management or whether women discuss these decisions with their healthcare providers…. This information is important for healthcare providers, and more research in this area is needed, said psychologist Carolyn Gibson, Ph.D., MPH, who was the lead author of the study.
Gibson, who is also a health services researcher at San Francisco VA Health Care System, presented the findings of the research together with her colleagues at the 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting of the North American Menopause Society. The event took place on September 28.
