Soon, her systolic and diastolic blood pressure dropped, suggesting that the THC in cannabis may lower blood pressure. Because Sativa cannabis strains have a higher THC content than indica strains, this suggests that they may lower blood pressure within moments of consuming them. Smoking marijuana can affect memory and cognitive function and cause harmful cardiovascular effects, such as high blood pressure. Long-term marijuana use can worsen respiratory conditions.
Experts believe that marijuana can slightly increase blood pressure and heart rate. This is likely to be related to the dose of marijuana consumed, since higher amounts cause a more severe impact than lower amounts. For this reason, people with high blood pressure may want to avoid excessive marijuana use. Prior to the detailed discussion of these results, several of the study's most important limitations deserve attention, the most important being the cross-cutting nature of NHANES, which restricts causal or temporal inferences.
Cannabis use was self-reported and was not determined by drug testing. The validity of self-reported cannabis use in a general population survey was compared with drug test results of urine samples obtained from the same respondents. The overall consistency between the self-report and the urinalysis was 89.8%. There were no data on the route of administration of cannabis (smoking versus errors in blood pressure measurement), since blood pressure was measured in a single NHANES examination.
To keep that in mind, we averaged blood pressure levels over up to four readings. There were no data on the frequency of cannabis use beyond the 30 days prior to the interview and, therefore, it is difficult to distinguish whether the association between cannabis use and blood pressure is short-lived or chronic in nature. We stratify our analysis by the characteristics of the participants to probe for any subgroup variation in the estimates; however, the results of these stratified analyses are limited by the multiplicity related to the number of analyses. Despite limitations such as these, the study's findings are of interest because of NHANES's standardized approaches to data collection and the ability to adjust for potential confounders.
They have previously reported a positive association between cannabis use and systolic blood pressure that was confused with increased alcohol use among cannabis users using 15 years of longitudinal data from 3,617 biracial young adults from four U.S. cities. UU. The current study included a relatively larger nationally representative multi-ethnic sample of American adults that can allow us to detect differences.
And how does CBD affect blood pressure? The consensus is that CBD tends to relax blood vessels and lower anxiety, which ultimately leads to lower blood pressure. This type of blood pressure reduction is more favorable, since it is associated with a decrease in anxiety levels. Both THC and CBD can lower blood pressure in different ways. However, according to available research, neither CBD nor THC should be considered a medical treatment for high blood pressure.