UK Study Finds Cannabis Helps Patients With Inflammatory Bowel Disease
International health researchers estimate that as many as 4.9 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. The highest rates of inflammatory bowel disease are found in China and the United States.
Inflammatory bowel disease is a wider health term used to describe a group of health conditions that cause swelling and inflammation of the tissues in the sufferer’s digestive tract. Ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease are examples of inflammatory bowel disease.
A team of researchers in the United Kingdom recently conducted a study involving the use of medical cannabis by patients diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. Below is more information about the study and its results via a news release from NORML:
London, United Kingdom: Patients diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) report sustained improvements in their health-related quality of life following their use of cannabis, according to observational data published in the journal Expert Review of Gastroenterology & Hepatology.
British researchers assessed the use of cannabis-based medicinal products (CBMPs) consisting of either botanicals or oil extracts in 116 IBD patients enrolled in the UK Medical Cannabis Registry. (British specialists are permitted to prescribe cannabis-based medicinal products to patients unresponsive to conventional medications.) Researchers assessed changes in patient-reported outcomes at 18 months.
Consistent with prior research, investigators reported, “CBMP treatment was associated with improvement in IBD-specific outcomes in patients and general HRQoL [health-related quality of life] over 18-months.”
According to a literature review published in October in the scientific journal Cureus, “Many IBD patients use cannabis to control disease symptoms, and there is emerging evidence that it may play a role in disease management.”
Other observational studies assessing the use of cannabis products in patients enrolled in the UK Cannabis Registry have reported them to be effective for those suffering from anxiety, fibromyalgia, post-traumatic stress, depression, migraine, multiple sclerosis, osteoarthritis, and inflammatory arthritis, among other conditions.
Full text of the study, “UK medical cannabis registry: An updated analysis of clinical outcomes of cannabis-based medicinal products for inflammatory bowel disease,” appears in Expert Review of Gastroenterology & Hepatology. Additional information on cannabis and inflammatory bowel disease is available from NORML’s publication, Clinical Applications for Cannabis & Cannabinoids.