2024-08-26 14:12:30
Smoking tobacco has long been considered carcinogenic. Now it has become known that cannabis consumption can also increase the risk of certain types of tumors.
Cannabis is one of the most popular and most commonly consumed drugs in the world. In Germany, almost one in three adults has smoked a joint at least once in their life; according to Statista, the figure for young adults is over 40 percent. Many people think that cannabis is less harmful to health than smoking tobacco. And in fact, according to current findings, smoking weed does not seem to damage the lungs as much, and the risk of lung cancer is also lower.
But new research results show for the first time that there is a connection between intensive cannabis use and various other types of cancer.
As part of a study, US researchers analyzed data from the national health database “TriNetX”. This database contains information from around 90 million people that was collected over a period of 20 years. The scientists divided the subjects into two groups: people with a cannabis-related disorder and people without such a disorder.
The cannabis-related disorder group included 116,076 people with an average age of 46.4 years, who were predominantly male (52.9 percent). The non-disorder group included people who used little or no cannabis and had no history of cancer. This applied to 3,985,286 people with an average age of 60.8 years, who were predominantly female (54.5 percent).
The result of the study: People from the first group, who were heavier cannabis users, had a higher risk of cancers of the neck and head area. Specifically, this risk was increased by 3.5 to 5 times for the individual tumor types. The head and neck tumors included:
A particularly strong correlation was found when the cancer occurred one year or more after the diagnosis of the cannabis disorder. Age, however, did not play a significant role: the increased risk of cancer was present in both younger and older users.
However, the study has several weaknesses. Since the patient data came from different sources in “TriNetX”, they contained very different information, so that direct comparability was not always guaranteed. There is also only limited information on how much cannabis the participants actually consumed.
Another problem: The findings show only correlations and not causal relationships. Further research is needed to draw more precise conclusions.