A federally funded study of cancer patients found that those using marijuana and cannabinoid products commonly reported benefits including pain relief, improved sleep, physical relaxation and emotional regulation, while researchers said the findings highlight the need for insurance coverage of medical marijuana.
The study, published August 14 in Frontiers in Psychiatry, examined survey responses from 65 adult cancer patients who reported using marijuana or cannabinoids therapeutically. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin, University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University and the Realm of Caring Foundation analyzed patients’ descriptions of the benefits and problems they experienced, along with why they began or stopped using the products.
The research was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, both part of the National Institutes of Health, as well as a research contract from the Realm of Caring Foundation.
Across the group, patients most commonly described pain relief, improved sleep or physical relaxation, better emotional regulation and reductions in other medications. Pain relief was the most frequently discussed benefit overall and was often connected with improvements in emotional well-being, sleep and reductions in medication use.
Researchers also compared patients who used only CBD-dominant products with those using products containing both CBD and THC. Pain relief emerged as the most prominent theme among patients using CBD and THC, while emotional regulation was more prominent among those using only CBD. The authors cautioned that those trends should be confirmed in larger studies.
Cost and stigma were the most frequently reported barriers. High product prices were a concern among both groups, while stigma surrounding THC was particularly notable among patients using THC-containing products. Some participants also described marijuana as allowing them to reduce their reliance on prescription medications.
The researchers said the results underscore the financial burden patients can face when paying for marijuana out of pocket, concluding that the study highlights “the need for insurance coverage of medicinal cannabis” for cancer patients.
The findings are observational and based on patients’ self-reported experiences rather than a controlled clinical trial. Researchers noted several limitations, including self-selection and self-reporting bias, a relatively small and insufficiently diverse sample, and the lack of laboratory verification of the cannabinoid products participants said they used. The study also did not collect information on participants’ cancer type, stage or treatment.
Researchers said future studies should involve larger and more diverse groups, objective measures of cannabinoid effectiveness and randomized trials that include patients who do not use marijuana.
“Overall, pain relief was the most frequently discussed benefit,” the researchers concluded, while noting that patients’ experiences differed depending on the cannabinoid composition of the products they used.
