Cannabis use was linked with cardiovascular disease in a survey of nearly half a million US adults, with higher risk of stroke a particular concern in the observational study.
Participants were interviewed by phone as part of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Those who reported cannabis use also reported higher rates of cardiovascular disease compared to nonusers, researchers will report at the AHA meeting.
This was true even in adults ages 18 to 44, in never-smokers, and in people without diabetes, hypertension, or obesity, they also found.
Compared with non-users, those who used cannabis up to five days per month had 23% higher odds of also reporting a history of cardiovascular disease. Participants who reported using it for 16 to 30 days per month had 21% higher odds of reporting cardiovascular disease.
The strongest link between cannabis use and cardiovascular disease was with stroke, although the findings were somewhat confounding. Low-frequency cannabis use was associated with 40% higher odds of stroke, and heavy use with 25% higher odds of stroke.
“We expected that the chances of heart disease would gradually rise as people used cannabis more often, but that wasn’t the case,” study leader Dr. Aabha Divya of Tulane University School of Medicine said in a statement.
While the study wasn’t designed to prove cannabis use caused heart disease, this is the second observational study to suggest that cannabis exposure in nonsmokers may be a risk factor for developing heart disease, Robert Page of the
University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the study, said in a statement.
“Clinicians should be addressing cannabis use with their patients as they would tobacco use when considering the risk of cardiovascular disease,” said Page, who chaired the writing group for the American Heart Association’s 2020 cannabis scientific statement.
