Heart attack tied to edible marijuana is a warning to doctors


Linda Carroll, Reuters
Posted at Feb 15 2019 01:17 AM
As medical and recreational marijuana becomes legal in more and more places, experts worry there isn’t enough science on the risks and benefits of the drug, especially for patients with heart disease.
In a new case report, doctors describe the heart attack of a man who ate a lollipop laced with high levels of TCH, marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient. This patient’s story may serve as a warning that cannabis isn’t as benign as some would like to think, doctors write in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.
The 70-year-old Canadian man, who had preexisting heart disease, suffered a heart attack half an hour after consuming most of a lollipop that contained 90 mg of TCH. The man had hoped it would help with arthritis pain and sleep. The dose in the lollipop was far greater than what people typically inhale with a single marijuana joint (7 mg), the researchers note.
“With access to marijuana legal now in Canada, it’s going to be accessible to a larger proportion of the population and it’s more likely that some of them will have heart disease,” said study coauthor Dr. Rob Stevenson, a cardiologist at the New Brunswick Heart Center in St. John, New Brunswick. “This could be the canary in the coal mine.”
The man already had been diagnosed with atherosclerosis and had bypass surgery, but he was taking medications to treat the condition, and his disease was “stable” at the time he consumed the edible cannabis, said lead study author Dr. Alex Saunders, chief resident of the internal medicine program at the St. John’s site for Dalhousie University. “After his bypass surgery he had no repeats of chest pain other than this one,” Saunders said.
The man had smoked marijuana in his youth and had fond memories of it, Saunders said. But once the effects of the high-dose THC in the lollipop started to hit, the man’s blood pressure and heart rate quickly shot up. “He described fearful hallucinations,” Saunders said “He was very afraid he was going to die.”
By the time family members got to him, “he was not only having hallucinations, but also intense chest pain,” Saunders said, adding that the terror the man experienced may have been too much for his heart.
Once at the hospital, doctors confirmed that he’d had a heart attack. The man survived his heart attack, but tires more quickly than before with exercise.
Saunders worries that with marijuana now legal in Canada, increasing numbers of people with heart disease will be using it and some of them will be at risk for heart attacks. “When I was in my rheumatology rotation, over half of my patients were asking if marijuana would help with the aches and pains that don’t get better with traditional medicine,” she said.
And while many would have avoided cannabis before, “now that it’s legal they don’t feel as bad,” Saunders said.
“One of the most reliable acute effects of the THC in cannabis is that it increases heart rate,” said Ryan Vandrey, who wasn’t involved in the case report. “And it’s dose dependent. Even at modest doses you can get increases in heart rate of 20 to 30 beats per minutes. And it can go higher. If someone with cardiovascular risk factors experiences a short-term bump in heart rate, that would be a concern.”
Vandrey, a psychiatry researcher at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, was especially disturbed by the high dose of THC in the lollipop. “Part of my frustration with products like this is that nobody is going to take just a couple of licks and then put it away,” he said. “There should be no circumstance where you get a product and you’re not supposed to consume the whole thing and it’s not clear when you’re supposed to stop.”
In an editorial accompanying the case report, Dr. Neal Benowitz of the University of California, San Francisco, outlines the different mechanisms by which THC can affect the heart and cautions doctors to keep these in mind when deciding whether and how to use cannabis to treat patients with heart disease.
SOURCE: bit.ly/2X2G8zc and bit.ly/2MXEpGL Canadian Journal of Cardiology, online February 11, 2019.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PCG: China’s bullying in West Philippine Sea undermines international law --- Ghio Ong - The Philippine Star

MANILA, Philippines — Letting China sustain its aggression in the West Philippine Sea would make other countries doubt the strength of international law currently being asserted by the Philippines, Commodore Jay Tarriela of the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) said. “Allowing China to blatantly disregard the established rules-based order threatens the very foundation that we all depend on,” he wrote in a post on X last Tuesday. He added, “If we permit this, countries worldwide may forget why this order was created in the first place. Nations could begin to doubt the significance of adhering to international law if powerful bullies can easily violate it.” Tarriela also said defiance of other countries to a rules-based order would result in the prevalence of cruelty. He wrote, “This could lead us back to a time when might makes right, undermining the global structures that keep human greed, savagery and barbarism in check. Such a scenario would not only invite challenges from aggressive ...
Read more

China ships maintain presence in key West Philippine Sea areas --- Michael Punongbayan - The Philippine Star

STAR / Michael Varcas MANILA, Philippines — While Chinese vessels in the West Philippine Sea (WPS) have decreased in number, they have maintained a presence in three key land features where naval and coast guard ships have intensified operations in the past seven days, according to the Philippine Navy. Latest monitoring by the Philippine Navy showed armed ships of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) maintaining a menacing presence around the grounded BRP Sierra Madre in Ayungin Shoal, Panatag Shoal and Escoda Shoal. According to the Philippine Navy, there are 17 Chinese military vessels and 28 China Coast Guard (CCG) boats spotted inside the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) between Sept. 23 and 30, or one vessel more than in the previous week Sept.17-23. Five of the warships were seen roaming around the vicinity of Escoda Shoal, along with 10 CCG vessels and 12 maritime militia vessels (MMVs). There are also two PLAN ships in Ayungin Shoal as well as 10 CCG boats and 12...
Read more

Social media seen as cause of rising intermarriages --- Helen Flores - The Philippine Star

MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) sees social media as the main reason for the rising number of Filipinos marrying or becoming partners of foreign nationals. In 2022, the CFO recorded 6,854 marriages or partnerships with foreign nationals, a 40.1 percent increase from the 4,891 “intermarriages” recorded in 2021. “First of all, what we see in the increase in the marriage rate of Filipinos or Filipinos with foreign partners is because of social media, (that) is number one; matchings; letters, introduction of their friends,” CFO chairperson Romulo Arugay said at the Bagong Pilipinas Ngayon public briefing yesterday. Arugay said the agency has been registering a high number of intermarriages since 2007, but the figures went down during the COVID-19 pandemic. From over 6,500 Filipinos who married foreign nationals, only 600 are men, he said. Most of them are married to Americans, Japanese, Germans, Canadians and Australians, Arugay said. Arugay warned Fi...
Read more