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Cannabis legalisation and cardiovascular hospitalisations in the USA

8 points gumby 2 days ago 10 comments

jwr 1 hour ago | parent

"Sorry, you have been blocked"

pjd7 46 minutes ago | parent

Same from AU

mrob 1 hour ago | parent

The important question now is finding out if it's the cannabinoids or the smoke inhalation. This study doesn't attempt to distinguish the two.

GordonS 1 hour ago | parent

Without accounting for route of administration, this paper seems pretty worthless... almost deliberately so?

weezing 21 minutes ago | parent

It's not totally worthless. It shows that recreational usage may lead to cardiovascular issues. Is it from the THC itself, way of administration, eating crap on munchies or having no motivation to move your ass is something for another paper.

GordonS 8 minutes ago | parent

Not worthless for the anti-cannabis lobby, I suppose.

dr_dshiv 58 minutes ago | parent

In the way the study is designed, it could also be the non-using spouses having to pick up more work. Or the loss of motivation (and regular aerobic activity) by the users.

wbshaw 5 minutes ago | parent

Or worsening food choices when you're high and get the munchies.

My_Name 49 minutes ago | parent

This paper seems to lack rigour. It starts with a premise then does not look at anything that might prove or disprove that premise. Hospital applications were not screened for cannabis use, only Colorado legalised but they used data from the whole western region, most importantly Medicaid also started at the same time as legalisation, do they investigate whether the availability of medical care prompted people to get medical treatment for their existing heart condition? They don't check whether the rise in cannabis use after legalisation was large enough to produce increases of this size across the whole population. An increase larger than the additional users would point to some other cause...

There is a whole website of similar spurious correlations (https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations). Will they now bring out a paper stating that Nicolas Cage films cause death by drowning? How about Solar power generation in Belize causing Fire inspectors in Florida, which both saw a very highly correlated jump in 2018?

ano-ther 12 minutes ago | parent

Except for cannabis related diagnoses, their effect size (change in the incidence rate ratio ∆IRR) is of a similar magnitude as opioid-related diagnoses which they included for falsification testing and said it did not change.

Am I misinterpreting their statistics?

> Cannabis-related diagnoses (∆IRR 1.138, 95% CI 1.066 to 1.214, p<0.001),

> AF (∆IRR 1.023, 95% CI 1.010 to 1.035, p<0.001),

> HF (∆IRR 1.037, 95% CI 1.029 to 1.046, p<0.001),

> MI (∆IRR 1.031, 95% CI 1.014 to 1.048, p<0.001),

> ischaemic stroke (∆IRR 1.011, 95% CI 0.999 to 1.024, p=0.078),

> VTE (∆IRR 1.009, 95% CI 0.999 to 1.020, p=0.066)

> and VT (∆IRR 1.019, 95% CI 0.993 to 1.046, p=0.161).

> For falsification testing, there was no change in hospitalisations for

> urinary stones (∆IRR 1.006, 95% CI 0.986 to 1.027, p=0.535) or

> opioid-related diagnoses (∆IRR 0.966, 95% CI 0.927 to 1.006, p=0.091).