The School o f Public Health at Georgia State University conducted a study that has shown that the longer a person uses marijuana, the more risk they have in developing conditions such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
The report was posted on the school’s website and has found that how long you use marijuana is a significant factor connected with the metabolic syndrome. This is an assortment of symptoms that increase the user’s risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
Data was collected on 3,051 adults age 20 and older from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2011-2012.
According to the study, “every year increase in marijuana use is associated with at least a 5 percent increase in odds of having metabolic syndrome.”
According to the study, by the end of last year, 28 states had legalized marijuana for medical use, and eight states and the District of Columbia had permitted recreational use of marijuana.
Interestingly, another study published in The American Journal of Medicine by the University of Miami School of Medicine found that marijuana users are about 50% less likely to develop metabolic syndrome compared to those people who have never smoked the drug.
The school conducted research from 8,500 people, ages 20 to 59, and classified individuals into three groups: people who currently use marijuana, people who used to consume marijuana and people who never used marijuana.
According to the study, approximately 19.5 percent of participants who had never used marijuana met the criteria for having metabolic syndrome, while just 17.5 percent of former weed users and 13.8 percent of current weed users met the same criteria for having metabolic syndrome.
The study said, “Marijuana users also showed mean fasting glucose levels — the way we determine how much sugar is in the blood — significantly lower than the levels when compared to people who never smoked, while waist circumference was significantly lower among men who currently smoked when compared to those that never did.”
“Among emerging adults, current marijuana users were 54 percent less likely than never users to present with metabolic syndrome,” the researchers said. “These findings have important implications for the nation as marijuana use becomes more accepted and we simultaneously face multiple epidemics of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.”
