Cannabis use disorder may raise heart problem risk by 60%, says study

People with cannabis use disorder have 60 per cent more chance of having heart diseases and strokes, according to a new study.

The study contributes to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the health implications of cannabis use disorder and its potential links to cardiovascular health.

"Our study doesn’t provide enough information to say that cannabis use disorder causes adverse cardiovascular disease events, but we can go so far as to say that people with cannabis use disorder appear to have a much higher risk of cardiovascular disease than people without the disorder,” said Dr Anees Bahji, lead author of the study.

In the study, published in the journal Addiction, researchers tracked 60,000 participants, half with a cannabis use disorder diagnosis and half without, matched by gender, year of birth, and time of presentation to the health system.

The team tracked participants from January 2012 to December 2019 and found that of all those with cannabis use disorder, 2.4 per cent (721) experienced a first-time cardiovascular disease event, compared with 1.5 per cent (458) in the unexposed group.

Within the group of people with cannabis use disorder, people with no co-occurring medical illness, no prescriptions, and fewer than five visits to health services in the last six months had an even higher risk of a first-time cardiovascular disease event, approximately 1.4 times higher than for the rest of the cannabis use disorder group.

This may be because those people considered themselves healthy and may not have acted on or even noticed the warning signs of an imminent heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular event, explained the researchers.