Cannabis users 29% more likely to experience heart risks, new study shows
A new study builds on previous research that shows marijuana usage can be attributed to cardiovascular risks.
Research published in Heart, an international peer-reviewed journal, documents that adults who use cannabis are 29% more likely than nonusers to develop Acute Coronary Syndrome and 20% more likely than nonusers to suffer from stroke. Acute Coronary Syndrome is any condition brought on by a reduction or blockage of blood flow to the heart, which can result in heart attacks.
Researchers surveyed 24 studies conducted between 2016 and 2023 that involved more than 400 million participants, ranging mostly between 19 and 59, according to the study.
"Our findings are consistent with those from previous reviews, which outlined a positive association between cannabis use and cardiovascular disorders," the study states. "The increased awareness of this potential risk among cannabis users should encourage investigating such use in all patients presenting with serious cardiovascular disorders."
Marijuana news: New study finds cannabis edibles raise risk of premature heart disease
Simply put, not enough research has been conducted to determine just how marijuana affects the cardiovascular system. The research that has been done has largely been conducted on the effects of smoking cannabis, in contrast to other modes of consumption like edibles.
But generally, researchers understand that marijuana can make the heart beat faster and raise blood pressure, as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Ahmed Mahmoud, a clinical instructor at Boston University, previously told USA TODAY that researchers believe marijuana may make small defects in the coronary arteries' lining, the thin layer of cells that forms the inner surface of blood vessels and hollow organs.
"Because cannabis increases the blood pressure and makes the blood run very fast and make some detects in the lining to the coronary arteries, this somehow could make a thrombosis (formation of a blood clot) or a temporary thrombosis in these arteries, which makes a cardiac ischemic (stroke) or the heart muscle is not getting enough oxygen to function," Mahmoud previously told USA TODAY. "This is what makes the heart injured and this is a myocardial infarction or heart attack."
Terms to know: Is marijuana the same as cannabis? What is THC?
The new study aligns with previous research about cannabis' effects on the cardiovascular system.
A study published earlier this year found that people under the age of 50 who consume marijuana are about 6.2 times more likely to experience a heart attack than nonusers. Young marijuana users are also 4.3 times more likely to experience an ischemic stroke and 2 times more likely to experience heart failure, the study shows.
And a study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association last year found the same, that cannabis users are more likely to experience cardiovascular risks than those who do not partake.
Greta Cross is a national trending reporter at USA TODAY. Story idea? Email her at gcross@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Heart risks 29% more likely among cannabis users, study shows
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
4 minutes ago
- CNN
What to know about thimerosal, a target of RFK Jr.'s new CDC vaccine advisers
A century ago, one of the biggest safety concerns about vaccines involved bacterial contamination. In 1916, four young children died in South Carolina after receiving typhoid vaccine that had been contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. Twelve years later, 12 children in Queensland, Australia, died from tainted immunizations against diphtheria. In the 1930s, vaccine makers began using a preservative called thimerosal to stave off microbial growth in their products. For the next six decades, it didn't receive much notice; ill effects appeared limited to minor local injection-site reactions, according to the US Food and Drug Administration. That changed in 1999, when US health officials asked pharmaceutical companies to remove thimerosal from vaccines. There was no evidence that it caused harm in the quantities used, but thimerosal contains a form of mercury, and questions had emerged about whether it could cause neurotoxicity when given in childhood vaccinations. Vaccine makers have removed it from all but a few shots, such as multidose vials of flu vaccine. In the meantime, subsequent studies have confirmed no link between thimerosal in vaccines and neurodevelopmental issues, including autism, and autism rates have continued to rise. So public health experts were puzzled when the preservative appeared on the agenda for this week's meeting of outside vaccine advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 'I actually don't know any pediatric practices that even use that multidose influenza vaccine,' said Dr. Sean O'Leary, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital Colorado and former liaison to the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, for the American Academy of Pediatrics. The group is meeting on Wednesday and Thursday for the first time since US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed the committee's previous 17 members, claiming they had conflicts of interest, and days later installed eight new advisers. Public health experts and lawmakers have called into question the credentials and backgrounds of some of the new panelists, and just before the meeting began, one member withdrew during the financial holdings review, an HHS spokesman said, bringing the panel down to seven. A presentation 'regarding thimerosal in vaccines' is scheduled for Thursday morning, followed by 'proposed recommendations' specifically about thimerosal in flu vaccines, according to an agenda posted Monday. The meeting is scheduled to conclude with a vote on the latter, a move that could lead to official CDC policy if adopted by agency leadership – or, without a confirmed director in place, by Kennedy. The last-minute addition of thimerosal to the agenda was a red flag for vaccine experts, who consider the science settled and fear that Kennedy – who led an anti-vaccine group called Children's Health Defense – is seeking to sow doubt about vaccine safety. Another former Children's Health Defense leader, Lyn Redwood, is slated to make a presentation on the topic at the meeting. Here's how thimerosal became such a hot-button issue. In 1997, Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat concerned about mercury pollution in his community's lakes and rivers, attached an amendment to a US Food and Drug Administration reauthorization bill that would require the agency to catalogue intentionally introduced mercury compounds in drugs and food. That led to a possibly startling discovery: 'As people looked in vaccines, there was the potential that, by six months of age, infants could have received more thimerosal than was listed in several sources of what was considered safe levels of mercury,' said Dr. Walter Orenstein, who was director of the National Immunization Program at the CDC at the time. But those limits were set for methylmercury, the kind found in some fish, which is known to be toxic. Thimerosal contains ethylmercury, a different compound that's 'intrinsically less stable, and more readily metabolized, than methylmercury,' said Dr. Matthew Rand, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at the University of Rochester who studies mercury toxicity. That means it's cleared from the body more quickly than methylmercury, according to the CDC, 'and is therefore less likely to cause any harm.' The FDA notes that there were no existing guidelines for ethylmercury. Still, the finding led to a number of emergency meetings among federal health officials and outside groups to determine what should be done, Orenstein recalled. 'While there was no evidence of harm from thimerosal, the general feeling was, 'let's get rid of it, because we don't need it,' ' he said. Moving to single-dose containers alleviated the need for a preservative, although it came at a higher expense for manufacturers. In 1999, the FDA sent a letter to manufacturers of US vaccines requesting their plans to remove thimerosal, and by 2001, the compound had been removed from or reduced in all vaccines routinely recommended for children under 6 in the US, according to the CDC. The message from public health agencies, Orenstein said, was 'we're going to make safe vaccines even safer.' But the die was cast. Vaccines had already been tied to autism in 1998 by British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who published a since-retracted paper that claimed the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was linked to autism, although not because of thimerosal – the MMR vaccine never contained the preservative. Still, parents of children with autism were seeking answers. One of those parents was Redwood, who said that in 1999, she tallied up her son's mercury exposure and found 'at two months of age, he had received 125 times his allowable exposure to mercury based on EPA's guidelines in his weight.' 'That was a real answer for me,' Redwood said in a video posted by Children's Health Defense this month, 'because my son at this time was almost 5 years old, and he had regressed developmentally after his first year of life and was diagnosed with autism.' Redwood, a nurse practioner, decided to become an advocate, speaking at events and publishing papers about thimerosal and autism. The uproar over a potential link between thimerosal and autism came as a surprise to Orenstein and colleagues. 'Mercury itself had never been implicated as a major cause of autism,' Orenstein said. 'But this was a major, major concern.' It led to a number of studies of the issue, including a 2004 assessment by the Institute of Medicine (now known as the National Academy of Medicine) that concluded 'the body of epidemiological evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism.' It made the same conclusion for MMR vaccines and autism. A 2010 study by the CDC also found no link. And 'even after thimerosal was removed from almost all childhood vaccines, autism rates continued to increase,' the agency noted, 'which is the opposite of what would be expected if thimerosal caused autism.' Still, those who continued to push the disproven autism connection included Kennedy, who published a book in 2014 called 'Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak.' Its subtitle calls for the 'immediate removal of mercury – a known neurotoxin – from vaccines.' It rejects the findings of the 2004 Institute of Medicine report and warns that millions of children in the US and around the world 'appear to be at risk of injury from the thimerosal in vaccines.' Thimerosal is still present in 'a small percentage of flu vaccines, confined to multidose vials,' according to a post from the Vaccine Integrity Project, a group focused on countering vaccine misinformation that was started at the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, or CIDRAP. The group suspects that thimerosal is included on ACIP's agenda this week – with a presentation by Redwood and a vote by the committee – 'to put greater focus on and generate more public discussion about vaccine risk.' HHS didn't return a request for comment about Redwood's involvement in this week's meeting, and Redwood declined to comment. Her presentation slides, however, were posted ahead of the meeting and continued to claim thimerosal presents safety risks. One slide initially included in the presentation cited a study in animals that appeared not to exist; its apparent lead author told CNN he'd published a study with a similar title, but in a different journal, in different animals, and with dramatically different findings — ones that didn't appear to show a link between autism and thimerosal. The slide presentation was subsequently updated to remove that slide. CDC staff also posted its own review of the data, citing nearly two dozen studies showing 'the evidence does not support an association between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism spectrum disorder or other neurodevelopmental disorders.' During her Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Dr. Susan Monarez, President Donald Trump's pick to lead the CDC, said, 'I have not seen a causal link between vaccines and autism.' The decision to remove thimerosal from most vaccines, despite no evidence of harm, had other consequences. At the same time the FDA made its request to vaccine makers, US health authorities advised that babies born to mothers known to be negative for hepatitis B not receive a shot for that virus at birth, but at two months to 6 months of age, as thimerosal was phased out. But about 10% of hospitals 'suspended use of the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns, regardless of their level of risk,' wrote Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA's outside advisory committee on vaccines, in a 2007 perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine. 'One three-month-old child born to a Michigan mother infected with hepatitis B virus died of overwhelming infection.' Orenstein looks back on the decision to remove thimerosal as a hard one. 'The fear would be keeping it in there, doing a study over two or three years and then it showed harm, and lo and behold, for three years, we used this vaccine and this component was harmful,' he said. 'Since we didn't know what the results would be of any of the studies at the time, we thought it better to just get it out of there. 'The autism issue,' he added, 'didn't play any role in the initial decision.' CNN's Brenda Goodman contributed to this report.
Geek Tyrant
8 minutes ago
- Geek Tyrant
Denis Villeneuve Set to Direct the Next JAMES BOND Film — GeekTyrant
After months of speculation, Amazon MGM Studios has confirmed that Dune and Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve is officially set to helm the next James Bond installment. This announcement comes after a long stretch of behind-the-scenes wrangling over the Bond franchise's creative direction, especially since Amazon acquired MGM for $8.5 billion in 2022. While Amazon gained distribution rights back then, they only recently secured full creative control of the Bond franchise through surprising deal with longtime producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. Since No Time to Die closed out Daniel Craig's run in 2021, Bond has essentially been in a holding pattern… until now. Villeneuve wasn't the only name being floated. According to Puck's Matt Belloni, other contenders included Edward Berger, Edgar Wright, Paul King, and, for a time, Alfonso Cuarón. But Cuarón reportedly bowed out, and Villeneuve, a lifelong Bond fan, rose to the top. Villeneuve is currently locked into Dune: Messiah , set for release in December 2026. He's also juggling a stack of high-profile projects, including Cleopatra , Rendezvous with Rama , and an adaptation of Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario . There's no word when he'll get around to making Bond, but the franchise is in good hands. He's already proven he can handle enormous IP with his signature auteur style. Both Dune films raked in critical acclaim, over $1.1 billion globally, and 15 Oscar nominations (eight wins). Then there's Blade Runner 2049 , which, despite its modest box office, has only grown in appreciation since its release. Villeneuve, who will executive produce alongside Tanya Lapointe, Amy Pascal, and David Heyman, clearly doesn't take this assignment lightly. He said in a statement: 'Some of my earliest movie-going memories are connected to 007. I grew up watching James Bond films with my father, ever since Dr. No with Sean Connery. I'm a die-hard Bond fan. 'To me, he's sacred territory. I intend to honor the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come. This is a massive responsibility, but also, incredibly exciting for me and a huge honor. Amy, David, and I are absolutely thrilled to bring him back to the screen. Thank you to Amazon MGM Studios for their trust.' Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, added: 'We are honored that Denis has agreed to direct James Bond's next chapter. He is a cinematic master, whose filmography speaks for itself. From Blade Runner 2049 to Arrival to the Dune films, he has delivered compelling worlds, dynamic visuals, complex characters, and—most importantly—the immersive storytelling that global audiences yearn to experience in theaters. James Bond is in the hands of one of today's greatest filmmakers and we cannot wait to get started on 007's next adventure.' Producers Pascal and Heyman added, 'Denis Villeneuve has been in love with James Bond movies since he was a little boy. It was always his dream to make this movie, and now it's ours, too. We are lucky to be in the hands of this extraordinary filmmaker.' No word yet on casting or a title or even what Bond's next mission will look like. But, under Villeneuve's direction, I have no doubt he'll do something awesome with it!
Health Line
11 minutes ago
- Health Line
Understanding Finger Tapping In Parkinson's Disease
Finger-tapping tasks are widely used to evaluate motor function in Parkinson's disease (PD), particularly bradykinesia. A healthcare professional can assess speed, rhythm, amplitude, and fatigue by watching you tap your index finger and thumb together repeatedly. Even slight changes in performance may signal disease progression or shifts in medication effectiveness. Irregularities in finger-tapping tasks — such as reduced amplitude, increased hesitation, or inconsistent rhythm — can appear before more explicit changes in movement become noticeable. Advancements in technology have expanded the precision and accessibility of finger tapping assessments. Smartphones, tablets, and wearable sensors can now record tap intervals, motion range, and variability with high accuracy. These tools allow for more objective tracking of motor symptoms and can detect fluctuations related to medication timing, including 'on' and 'off' periods. In clinical trials, finger tapping is frequently used as an outcome measure for evaluating new therapies. Its ease of repetition and quantification make it ideal for monitoring treatment effects over time. Finger tapping is usually tested during office visits with a neurologist. Your neurologist may use a device to objectively measure tapping. In some cases, they may ask you to measure tapping at home using a specific tool. Take action
