Link Between Cannabis Use Disorder and Heart Problem Risk

Individuals diagnosed with cannabis use disorder face a 60% higher likelihood of experiencing heart diseases and strokes.

“Our study doesn’t provide enough information to say that cannabis use disorder causes adverse cardiovascular disease events, but we can go so far as to say that people with cannabis use disorder appear to have a much higher risk of cardiovascular disease than people without the disorder,” said Dr. Anees Bahji, lead author of the study.

In the study, published in the journal ‘Addiction’, researchers tracked 60,000 participants, half with a cannabis use disorder diagnosis and half without, matched by gender, year of birth, and time of presentation to the health system.

The team tracked participants from January 2012 to December 2019 and found that out of people with cannabis use disorder, 2.4 percent (721) experienced a first-time cardiovascular disease event, compared with 1.5 percent (458) in the unexposed group.


This may be because those people considered themselves healthy and may not have acted on or even noticed the warning signs of an imminent heart attack, stroke, or other major cardiovascular event, explained the researchers.