THC Provides Symptomatic Relief To Patients With Tourette Syndrome
As many as one percent of people worldwide suffer from Tourette Syndrome to some degree, although many cases go undiagnosed. Tourette Syndrome is a nervous system disorder that involves the patient making repetitive movements and/or unwanted sounds.
Most cases of Tourette’s Syndrome start when the sufferer is a child, with some cases getting worse as the patient gets older. Typical treatments for Tourette Syndrome includes pharmaceutical medications and/or psychological therapies.
Cannabis is another form of treatment for Tourette Syndrome, albeit an emerging form of treatment that is not as common. A recent study in Canada found cannabis to be effective in some cases. Below is more information about it via a news release from NORML:
Toronto, Canada: Vaporized cannabis containing ten percent THC provides symptomatic relief to patients with Tourette Syndrome (TS), according to placebo-controlled data published in the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research.
Canadian researchers assessed the short-term effects of vaporized cannabis of varying potencies versus placebo in nine patients with TS.
They reported that subjects exhibited and perceived modest improvements following the administration of THC-dominant cannabis, but that they failed to demonstrate similar improvements following the use of either lower THC cannabis and/or high-CBD cannabis. Researchers acknowledged, “[G]iven the small sample size, … it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions about the benefits of THC.”
Prior studies assessing the long-term use of oral THC have documented a reduction in tics in TS patients. The findings of a 2019 study concluded, “Medical cannabis seems to hold promise in the treatment of GTS [Gilles de la Tourette syndrome] as it demonstrated high subjective satisfaction by most patients however not without side effects and should be further investigated as a treatment option for this syndrome.”
Full text of the study, “A double-blind, randomized, controlled crossover trial of cannabis in adults with Tourette Syndrome,” appears in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research. Additional information on cannabis and TS is available from NORML.