San Francisco, CA: Older adults who consume cannabis are no more likely to suffer from adverse cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke, as compared to non-users, according to longitudinal data published in the journal Circulation.
Researchers affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco assessed cannabis use and cardiovascular health in a cohort of 4,285 older veterans (mean age: 67.5) with a history of coronary artery disease. Approximately 25 percent of study participants (1,015 veterans) reported current cannabis use, while the remaining 3,122 participants did not. Subjects were followed for an average of 3.3 years.
Contrary to investigators’ expectations, current cannabis use was not independently associated with elevated rates of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular death, or all-cause mortality once researchers adjusted for covariates.
“To our knowledge, the current study is the only study to examine the association of cannabis use with longitudinal cardiovascular disease outcomes among persons with established CAD [coronary artery disease],” the study’s authors concluded. “In this older cohort of veterans with CAD, smoking cannabis was not associated with the composite outcome of AMI [acute myocardial infarction], stroke, and cardiovascular death, a finding that was consistent across multiple measures of cannabis exposure.”
Although individual studies assessing cannabis use and cardiovascular health have yielded inconsistent results, a literature review of 67 papers published in The American Journal of Medicine concluded, “[M]arijuana itself does not appear to be independently associated with excessive cardiovascular risk factors.” Most recently, an analysis of over 720,000 adults published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (AJPM) Focus concluded that current cannabis consumers do not possess a greater risk of heart attack as compared to non-users.
Full text of the study, “Association of smoking cannabis with cardiovascular events among veterans with coronary artery disease,” appears in Circulation.