Chronic pain patients are more likely to respond favorably to cannabis than they are to prescription analgesics, according to data published in the journal Pain.
Researchers affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh assessed outcomes in 440 pain patients certified to consume medical cannabis products and 8,114 pain patients prescribed traditional analgesics.
They reported that those in the cannabis-treatment cohort were slightly more likely than controls to experience clinically meaningful improvements in their pain. Investigators further reported that subjects who used both cannabis and opioids were more likely to reduce their opioid use over time as compared to those who did not. “Our results do point to possible use [of cannabis] as an adjunct in trying to wean opioids successfully,” they wrote.
The study’s authors concluded: “In sum, … we found that medical marijuana was comparatively more effective than prescription medication treatment for chronic pain, with the odds of responding being 2.6 times higher in the medical marijuana group and having twice the predicted probability of a positive response. While we found that medical marijuana was comparatively more effective, we cannot extrapolate to conclude that medical marijuana is likely more effective in other populations, particularly because we compared two different (albeit similar) populations. Because the rate of response in the control group (34.9 percent) was very similar to the marijuana group (38.6 percent) at three months, a more conservative interpretation of our results is that medical marijuana is at least as effective as prescription medications for chronic pain.”
Data published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that nearly one in three patients with chronic pain use cannabis as an analgesic agent and many of those who do substitute it in place of opioids.
The full text of the study, “The comparative effectiveness of medicinal cannabis for chronic pain versus prescription medication treatment,” appears in Pain. Additional information on cannabis and pain is available from NORML’s publication, Clinical Applications for Cannabis & Cannabinoids.