Purpose: Poor sleep is one of the most common side effects of cancer treatment. One increasingly popular approach to manage side effects of cancer treatment is use of medicinal cannabis (MC).
Design: Cancer patients using MC participated in semi-structured interviews to assess their experiences with MC (n = 24). A multi-stage thematic analysis was applied to interview transcripts. Themes related to use of MC for sleep were extracted.
Findings: The majority reported MC use for sleep. These participants reported that MC improved sleep initiation and continuity, resulted in decreased use of sleep medications, and that improved sleep led to better health. No participant reported MC was ineffectual for sleep or caused undesirable side effects when used for sleep.
Conclusions: Cancer patients often utilize MC to specifically manage poor sleep. There is a need for rigorous studies assessing prevalence of use for this indication and clinical trials to assess comparative efficacy and safety.
thatpurple on April 17th, 2021 at 14:25 UTC »
As a cancer patient who was a regular smoker for years I feel the effects on sleep are short term in regards to marijuana use. When you first start smoking you can indeed fall asleep faster but I feel that wears off as a tolerance builds. Whenever I do not smoke for extended periods I find I am able to stay asleep longer and fall back asleep easier if I wake up in the middle of the night. I found during my treatment that smoking really helped my stomach aches more than anything. This of course is my own personal experience.
Unless I’m missing something this wasn’t exactly a “controlled experiment” and is highly subjective in the way they went about capturing data.
pseudo_ersatz on April 17th, 2021 at 14:13 UTC »
Am I missing something here? The researchers asked 8 dispensaries across the USA, where marijuana was permitted, to hand out flyers to patients with cancer who were using marijuana. They did this for 2 years, and found 24 patients. And then they said to these 24 patients: "does it help your sleep?" and they all said "yes, it's great." Various patients also said it helped their anxiety, their pain, their "emotional ups and downs".
The data seems a bit disingenous to me, because if you look at their original study [ https://doi.org/10.1002/cncr.33202 ], they say that less than half of these 24 patients (10) said they used it for sleep -- most reported using it for pain (19), nausea (14), and anxiety/depression (13).
It's interesting, but doesn't it seem that (a) patients who didn't find marijuana helpful for sleep were probably not going to be, well, going to dispensaries to get marijuana, and that (b) 24 is an awfully small number of patients for having canvassed places all across the USA over a 2 year period, and (c) patients with cancer who are going to dispensaries are pretty likely to be having some trouble with sleep/anxiety/pain.
It seems like an awfully weak study to me, and hardly seems like a ringing endorsement of marijuana for sleep. In fact, a more appropriate title would be "over 2 years of study at dispensaries in states with permissive legislation, only 24 cancer patients were identified who used medical cannabis; less than half of them reported using it for sleep, although when asked about sleep they all said it helped".
Hmm. I'm not very good at titles.
EDITED @ 2021-04-17T0925-0800: to fix broken link to other study
Sylvercreed on April 17th, 2021 at 12:13 UTC »
No details on REM sleep disruption or SWS. Disfortunate.