According to a new clinical trial, cannabis could be a safe and potentially effective treatment in treating chronic pain that affects sickle cell disease sufferers.
The trial was co-led by University of California, Irvine researcher Kalpna Gupta, a professor of medicine on the faculty of UCI’s Center for the Study of Cannabis, and Dr. Donald Abrams of UC San Francisco with the findings published in JAMA Network Open.
“These trial results show that vaporized cannabis appears to be generally safe,” said Gupta. “They also suggest that sickle cell patients may be able to mitigate their pain with cannabis — and that cannabis might help society address the public health crisis related to opioids. Of course, we still need larger studies with more participants to give us a better picture of how cannabis could benefit people with chronic pain.”
The double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial was the first ever to employ such gold-standard methods to assess cannabis’s potential for pain alleviation in people with sickle cell disease.
The marijuana used in the trial was obtained from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and had equal parts of THC and CBD.
As part of the trial and reported by Science Daily, twenty-three patients with sickle cell disease-related pain completed the trial, inhaling vaporized cannabis or a vaporized placebo during two five-day inpatient sessions that were separated by at least 30 days.
“Pain causes many people to turn to cannabis and is, in fact, the top reason that people cite for seeking cannabis from dispensaries,” Gupta said. “We don’t know if all forms of cannabis products will have a similar effect on chronic pain. Vaporized cannabis, which we employed, may be safer than other forms because lower amounts reach the body’s circulation. This trial opens the door for testing different forms of medical cannabis to treat chronic pain.”
