Kelly Hughes

 

The problem: Benzodiazepines are commonly prescribed for a variety of neurological conditions such as anxiety and insomnia. However, these drugs can be habit-forming, and can cause side effects including dizziness, sleepiness, disorientation, and sometimes fatal overdoses.  It’s possible that for some people, cannabis might be a safer, less toxic substitute.

 

Why do this study? Cannabidiol (CBD), seems to have effects similar to those of benzodiazepines and has been promising in early trials of treating anxiety disorders. This study was designed to see whether people who start using cannabis are able to reduce their use of benzodiazepines.

 

The study: This study used patient data from a medical cannabis clinic in Canada (Canabo Medical Clinic) and looked at patients who were using benzodiazepines when they started cannabis therapy.  Then researchers followed patients’ benzodiazepine use for three follow-up visits (approximately 6 months).  In total, 146 were enrolled and completed all three follow-up visits. Of these, 30.1% stopped using benzodiazepines by their first follow-up visit (approximately two months after initial cannabis prescription), 44.5% had stopped using benzodiazepines after their second follow-up, and 45.2% had stopped benzodiazepines after their third follow-up visit. The THC:CBD ratio isn’t associated with whether patients stopped their benzodiazepines. Overall, patients who stopped taking benzodiazepines reported a better quality of life (as measured by the impact of their medical condition on daily life) than those who were still taking benzodiazepines.

 

Conclusions: Many patients in this study stopped taking their benzodiazepines after starting medical cannabis therapy. There’s an opportunity here for future research to determine if cannabis can in fact replace benzodiazepines, and whether it’s a safer alternative.

 

What does this study add? This study suggests that cannabis therapy might provide an alternative to benzodiazepine use for some patients.

 

Funder: No funding was used for this study

 

Author Conflicts: The data used for this study came from the Canabo Medical Clinic and one of the authors has previously been paid to provide data analysis services for this clinic. However, the authors state that this had no impact on the analysis of these data sets and is unrelated to this study.

 

Commentary:  This is a nice preliminary study of an important topic. These patients seemed to stop using benzodiazepines, which is certainly interesting.  However, there’s a lot that we don’t know about this study.  For instance, we don’t know if patients were trying to stop.  We also don’t know what other medications they were taking. Maybe they stopped using benzodiazepines, but switched to other medications.  This study also relied on self-reports of benzodiazepine use, so we don’t know whether they actually stopped.  Still, these results are interesting enough to think about doing a randomized controlled trial to see if cannabis can really substitute for banzodiazepines, and if the result is better quality of life and a safer medication profile.