Berlin, Germany: Chronically ill patients who use authorized medical cannabis products report improvements in their quality of life, according to data published in the German medical journal Schmerz.
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German investigators assessed patient-reported outcomes in a nationwide cohort of 1,582 patients authorized to use cannabis by their physicians. (Plant cannabis and cannabinoid treatments, such as dronabinol, were legalized by prescription use in Germany in 2017;
however, cannabis products are typically only authorized when patients are unresponsive to traditional therapies.) Patients suffered from chronic pain, depression, sleep disturbances, and other symptoms.
Eighty-four percent of those surveyed reported quality of life improvements following their use of cannabis.
“Cannabis therapy [may] improve the quality of life of chronically ill patients, regardless of the underlying disease,” the study’s authors concluded.
The findings are consistent with those of observational studies from Australia and the United Kingdom concluding that cannabis use improves chronically ill patients’ health-related quality of life.
Full text of the study, “Patient-reported outcomes in chronic diseases under treatment with cannabis medicines: Analysis of the results of the Copeia survey,” appears in Schmerz.
