According to brand-new reseaarch, marijuana usage increases discomfort after surgical treatment.
Adults who utilize marijuana experience more discomfort after surgical treatment compared to individuals who do not utilize marijuana. This is according to a clinical research study provided at the ANESTHESIOLOGY ® 2022 yearly conference.
“Cannabis is the most commonly used illicit drug in the United States and increasingly used as an alternative treatment for chronic pain, but there is limited data that shows how it affects patient outcomes after surgery,” stated lead author of the research study, Elyad Ekrami, M.D. “Our study shows that adults who use cannabis are having more — not less — postoperative pain. Consequently, they have higher opioid consumption after surgery.” Ekrami is a medical research study fellow of the Outcomes Research Department at Cleveland Clinic’s Anesthesiology Institute.
“Physicians should consider that patients using cannabis may have more pain and require slightly higher doses of opioids after surgery.”– Elyad Ekrami, M.D.
Researchers evaluated the records of 34,521 adult clients who had optional surgical treatments at Cleveland Clinic from January 2010 to December2020 1,681 (5%) of the individuals were marijuana users. The marijuana users had actually utilized the drug within 30 days prior to surgical treatment, while the other clients had actually never ever utilized marijuana. The clients who utilized marijuana knowledgeable 14% more discomfort throughout the very first 24 hours after surgical treatment compared to the clients who never ever utilized marijuana. Additionally, clients who utilized marijuana taken in 7% more opioids after surgical treatment, which the authors note was not statistically substantial, however is most likely medically appropriate.
“The association between cannabis use, pain scores, and opioid consumption has been reported before in smaller studies, but they’ve had conflicting results,”Dr Ekrami included. “Our study has a much larger sample size and does not include patients with chronic pain diagnosis or those who received regional anesthesia, which would have seriously conflicted our results. Furthermore, our study groups were balanced by confounding factors including age, sex, tobacco, and other illicit drug use, as well as depression and psychological disorders.”
Dr Ekrami kept in mind that extra research study is required to even more specify marijuana’ impacts on surgical results. “Physicians should consider that patients using cannabis may have more pain and require slightly higher doses of opioids after surgery, emphasizing the need to continue exploring a multimodal approach to post-surgical pain control,” he stated.
