According to new research from Washington State University (WSU) that was published in The Journal of Affective Disorders, some people find their symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) dramatically drop after smoking cannabis.
The study has revealed that cannabis may be beneficial in the short term for those with OCD but more research is needed to understand the long-term effect.
The WSU study relied on self-reported user data gathered by a smartphone app called Strainprint.
Subjects were able to report the severity of their OCD symptoms, before and after cannabis use, which offered the researchers a way to follow the efficacy of cannabis as a treatment in real-time, and in relation to the varying THC or CBD levels from strain to strain.
The WSU team had also produced three prior studies analyzing Strainprint data, most notably finding many cannabis users self-administer the drug to treat severe headaches and migraines.
The new study tracked data from 87 subjects with OCD symptoms using the Strainprint app. In a time span of over 31 months these subjects logged more than 1,800 cannabis sessions.
OCD symptoms were divided into three categories: intrusions, compulsions, and anxiety), with each user rating their symptoms from 0 to 10, both before and after a cannabis session.
The study found subjects reported a 60 percent drop in compulsions, a 49 percent drop in intrusions, and a 52 percent drop in anxiety from before to after smoking cannabis.
“The results overall indicate that cannabis may have some beneficial short-term but not really long-term effects on obsessive-compulsive disorder,” said Carrie Cuttler, corresponding author on the new study. “To me, the CBD findings are really promising because it is not intoxicating. This is an area of research that would really benefit from clinical trials looking at changes in compulsions, intrusions and anxiety with pure CBD.”