For one and a half years, seriously ill people in Germany can receive cannabis-containing medicines or cannabis flowers on medical prescription. Around 100,000 prescriptions were redeemed by the pharmacies in 2018.
Reasons for such a prescription are besides chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy also anxiety disorders, the Tourette syndrome and ADHD, such as the Techniker Krankenkasse writes.
However, whether cannabis has medical benefits in mental illness has not been sufficiently researched. A group of scientists has now summarized in a so-called meta-analysis the studies that investigated whether cannabis helps with six different diseases - namely: depression, anxiety disorder, ADHD, psychosis, posttraumatic stress disorder and Tourette's syndrome. They evaluated a total of 83 studies with around 3000 participants.
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The conclusion of the group around Louisa Degenhardt from the Australian National Drug and Alcohol Research Center in Sydney:
- Medicines containing the cannabis drug THC can probably alleviate the symptoms in patients with anxiety disorders.
- According to a single study, THC-containing drugs in patients with psychosis can aggravate them.
- Apart from this, it can not be deduced from the available studies that cannabis-containing remedies have a positive effect beyond the placebo effect in the mentioned diseases.
- However, taking cannabis-containing medications has more often had undesirable side effects. As a result, more people stopped taking their studies prematurely, which received a cannabis-containing drug rather than a drug-free placebo.
Consumption not recommended
Degenhardt and her team criticize in their publication in the journal "The Lancet Psychiatry" that larger, high-quality studies on the effect of cannabis in the listed diseases are missing. In most of the studies they evaluated, participants suffered from multiple sclerosis or severe pain, as well as anxiety disorder or depression.
They therefore claim that the use of cannabis-containing agents in the six diseases mentioned is not recommended due to the limited data available and known risks of consumption. Should physicians and patients nevertheless decide in individual cases, it is necessary to observe positive or negative effects very closely.
The group believes that due to the general interest in medical cannabis, major studies are urgently needed to clarify how helpful or risky it is to use compared to existing therapies.