!Cannabis Causes Strokes in Young People - Irish Times!

Si Dread

Si Dread

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High potency cannabis is putting young people who heavily use the drug at risk of stroke, a leading specialist told an inquest.

Consultant stroke physician professor Joseph Harbison told Dublin Coroner’s Court that doctors at St James’s Hospital have seen “five or six cases” of young people having strokes following the use of herbal cannabis in the past three years. The strokes may be linked to the increased potency of cannabis available in Ireland over that period, he said.

He was speaking at the inquest into the death of 33-year-old Noel Boylan of Oliver Bond House in Dublin 8 who collapsed on Thomas Street in the city centre on August 17th last year.

Mr Boylan was taken to St James’s Hospital where he was treated for a suspected seizure but later developed a stroke. He died in the hospital on September 2nd when a blood clot travelled to his lungs.

Following his death, prof Harbison requested that an autopsy be carried out because Mr Boylan had been a regular cannabis smoker.

The drug has been linked to strokes in young people but it is not known why.

Until Mr Boylan’s death it had not been possible to study the blood vessels in the brain affected because few young people die from stroke and brain biopsies are dangerous, the court heard.

When the blood vessel was examined by a neuropathologist, they found that the lining had “grossly thickened” and blocked off the artery resulting in the stroke. Prof Harbison said that this echoed findings in another of his patients, a heavy cannabis user who had had a blood vessel outside the brain biopsied after surviving a stroke. This raised concerns that the potency of cannabis available in Ireland is affecting heavy users by irritating the lining of blood vessels, he said.

“The cannabis available in and around Ireland at the moment is typically hydroponically [IN WATER]grown and has a very high potency… I now strongly suspect that we are seeing the consequences of younger people developing an arteriopathy [arterial disease] related to the direct irritant effects of this new potent cannabis,” he said.

Returning a narrative verdict outlining the facts coroner Dr Brian Farrell said that further research into the link between high potency cannabis and stroke is needed and that he hoped the case would generate debate in the medical community.

Speaking following the inquest, prof Harbison said that he did not believe that irregular users of the drug are at risk.

“There is a level of concern that there is an association with particularly heavy users. We are seeing people coming in with strokes where we cannot find any cause but their cannabis use. This case and the other case leads you to think that there is a direct organic effect to it,” he said.
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From - http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crim...es-in-young-people-irish-medic-says-1.1557815
 
If this is true, then the incidence of stroke in young people in the western US should be even higher, as that weed is even more potent.
 
Sure seems to be a lot of speculation here.. Just because they " cannot find any cause but their cannabis use" does not mean that cannabis is the cause. Sorry in colorado we have been using very potent cannabis for a long long time and I have never heard of this so I think they had better extend the witch hunt.
 
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Yes, Cannabis can raise blood pressure and should be avoided by people at risk of stroke. But christ Doc, take a statistics class.
 
Clocktower said:
Yes, Cannabis can raise blood pressure and should be avoided by people at risk of stroke. But christ Doc, take a statistics class.
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Cannabis can raise blood pressure? Now I know it CAN raise blood pressure and lower it but from what I know it doesn't really raise the blood pressure and quite often it lowers it. I'd like to see specific information on this because I see this go both ways and from what I've seen cannabis can do both... which would mean it probably does nothing in that regard.
 
6 people over 3 years dying while at some point having ingested cannabis is not news. I'm sure if you look hard enough you could connect people dying because of various causes while high.
To say that a blood clot, probably a deep vein thrombus from the legs, is a direct result of cannabis without actually having a suspect mechanism (or many more associated complications) is irresponsible. Arteries in the brain don't just "grossly thicken" from using cannabis. It sounds more like a chance victim of a poorly constructed vessel with blood pressure issues.

“The cannabis available in and around Ireland at the moment is typically hydroponically [IN WATER]grown and has a very high potency… I now strongly suspect that we are seeing the consequences of younger people developing an arteriopathy [arterial disease] related to the direct irritant effects of this new potent cannabis,”
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He knows this because he has done, or read, studies verifying the arteriopathic properties of high potency cannabis. Or maybe because he learned medicine under a celtic druid.. Free cannabinoids floating around irritating vessels to the point of local infarct..rright (Cocaine does this, but operates by a different mechanism than that of local irritation). All across the world young people are dying off from cannabis!!

Or is it...
88 deaths every month in Ireland are directly attributable to alcohol
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http://alcoholireland.ie/facts/alcohol-related-harm-facts-and-statistics/
 
Captain.Heroin said:
Bring on a stroke god.
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The most fun is learning to walk again, yeah that was fucking awesome. Even though i tore an artery in my neck and that caused the stroke i am going to be some drug related statistic somewhere because of all the drugs i admitted to doing before the stroke.
Weed doesn't cause strokes. Alot of young people smoke weed. Young people sometimes have strokes, the 2 are not connected.
 
my3rdeye said:
Weed doesn't cause strokes. Alot of young people smoke weed. Young people sometimes have strokes, the 2 are not connected.
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How can you be confident that you know this?

I'm on Team Cannabis too, but there are a lot of case studies implicating cannabis in stroke.

This abstract summarizes the issue nicely:

J Stroke Cerebrovasc Dis. 2012 Oct;21(7):555-60. doi:
10.1016/j.jstrokecerebrovasdis.2010.12.010. Epub 2011 Mar 2.

Cannabis-related stroke: case series and review of literature.

Singh NN, Pan Y, Muengtaweeponsa S, Geller TJ, Cruz-Flores S.

Department of Neurology, University of Missouri Columbia, Missouri 65212, USA.
[email protected]ri

Marijuana, or cannabis, is one of the most commonly used illicit drugs worldwide.
Although there are some case reports of stroke associated with cannabis use,
there is no information on a causal role of cannabis in stroke. We identified 14
patients admitted to St Louis University Hospital between January 2004 and July
2007 with ischemic stroke who had documented clear exposure to cannabis during or
before symptom onset and a positive urine screen for cannabis. We report this
series, along with 3 cases previously reported by our group, for a total of 17
patients (13 men and 4 women), with a mean age of 41 years (range, 15-63 years).
Nine patients were under age 45 years, 4 had a history of hypertension, and 10
sustained stroke in the posterior circulation. Headache, dysarthria, and ataxia
were the most common presenting symptoms. Five patients had recurrent stroke with
reexposure to cannabis. No patient had a prothrombotic state or cardiac source of
embolism. Autopsy performed in 2 patients revealed hemorrhagic infarct with no
evidence of vasculitis or embolus. The absence of other vascular risk factors in
most of our patients, the temporal relation of symptom onset to cannabis
exposure, and the recurrence of symptoms in a few patients with reexposure
suggest a causal role of cannabis in these cases of ischemic stroke. However,
this causal association cannot be definitely ascertained, given the descriptive
nature of our series. More research is needed to explore this possible causal
association.

Copyright © 2012 National Stroke Association. All rights reserved.

PMID: 21367621 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
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i.e. you can't yet say that it does, but you also can't say that it doesn't.
 
Good work!

I wonder, given the vascular problems that tobacco causes & how often the two are smoked together, especially here in Western Europe, whether it would be prudent to seperate the users of each when reporting the results of a study such as the Irish one..?

If these results could be shown in users of cannabis alone, I might buy 'em.
 
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