By Benjie Cooper
IG: @nuglifenews
YouTube: Lucid’s Vlog
A group of researchers at Arizona State University recently concluded a five-year study analyzing adult patients in the Arizona State Trauma Registry. Between 2008 and 2012, the group studied a total of 28,813 pre-screened patients to determine what relationship might exist between trauma patients’ positive marijuana screenings and their mortality rates.
The study, “How Does Marijuana Effect Outcomes After Trauma in ICU Patients? A Propensity Matched Analysis,” was published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery and online by the National Institute of Health. The study acknowledges an increase in cannabis use among adults and adolescent trauma patients in recent years and looks to help by providing some answers and provoking further investigation.
Researchers were primarily looking to observe patients with cannabis-positive toxicology reports in the study; those who tested positive for cannabis were included while applicants whose tests indicated the use of alcohol or other substances were excluded. Researchers measured mortality, ventilator days, ICU, and total length of the hospital visit.
Of the 28,813 adults observed in the study, 1,399 of the cannabis-positive patients were matched up with an equal number of cannabis-negative ones to determine if they could observe any measurable difference in their outcomes. Controls were added for age and injury severity score and the Glasgow-Coma-Scale was also utilized throughout the study as a method of measuring varying levels of patient consciousness.
In its conclusion, the study admits a positive link between cannabis use and a decreased mortality rate in adult trauma patients admitted to the ICU. While cannabis users exhibited a higher rate of ventilator use, their death rate was lower than non-users. The mortality rate in non-cannabis users who were put on a ventilator was 16.1% whereas cannabis users only demonstrated a 7.3% death rate. According to the study results, non-marijuana-using patients who were using ventilators showed that they were more than twice as likely to succumb to life-threatening trauma than the cannabis consumers.
The results from this new Arizona State study appear to reinforce ones from a 3-year study which was concluded in 2014 by researchers from the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California. In their study, which involved 446 drug-screened TBI patients, they found that “A positive THC screen is associated with decreased mortality in adult patients sustaining TBI.” Of the patients they observed, 2.4% of those who tested positive for THC died but 11.5% of the non-users died, exhibiting a death rate nearly five times higher than that of the cannabis consumers. At the time, study co-author and surgeon Brian Nguyen stated that more research on the benefits of medical cannabis were needed.
Researchers in the 2017 Arizona study concludes by saying that based on their results, “This association warrants further investigation of the possible physiological effects of marijuana in trauma patients.” These new results can be added to the growing pile of evidence showing that compounds produced within the cannabis plant can be a positive factor in a patient’s recovery from a traumatic injury, as well as maintaining everyday physical and neurological health.
