Cannabis and sleep – new study finds a link.

Cannabis and sleep ?

For many people, smoking before bed is the key to success, but new research published this suggests that this is not the case.

let’s look at the studies

The study, published in The BMJ, sought to “determine the relationship between cannabis use and night-time sleep duration in a nationally representative dataset”, which was “a cross-sectional analysis of adults based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2005 to 2018“.al

According to CNN, the study “analyzed cannabis use for sleep among 21,729 adults ages 20 to 59” and found that the data “is representative of more than 146 million Americans.”

“Respondents were categorised into users or non-users of cannabis in the past 30 days“. – the authors explain in the study methodology. “The primary outcome was sleep duration per night, categorised as short (less than 6 hours), optimal (6-9 hours) and long (more than 9 hours). Multinomial logistic regression was used to adjust for sociodemographic and health variables, and the study sample weights were used in the modelling.”

The study found that “adults who used cannabis 20 or more days in the past month were 64% more likely to sleep less than six hours a night and 76% more likely to sleep more than nine hours a night,” CNN reported, adding that moderate cannabis use, defined as “using cannabis less than 20 days in the past month . . did not create short-term sleep problems, but people were 47% more likely to sleep nine or more hours a night, the study also found.”

CNN reported that “in addition to short and long sleep problems,” the study also found that people “who had used cannabis in the past 30 days were also more likely to report having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, and more likely to report talking to a doctor about sleep problems.”

“The problem with our study is that we can’t say for sure that it’s causal, which means we can’t know for sure whether it was simply people having trouble sleeping and therefore using cannabis, or whether it was caused by cannabis,” said Calvin Diep, a resident in the department of anesthesiology and pain medicine at the University of Toronto who was the lead author of the study, as quoted by CNN.

“The problem is that there is a disconnect between the anecdotal reports of people reporting therapeutic benefit and the data behind them,” Diep said.

Dr Karim Ladha, staff anaesthetist and clinician-scientist in the department of anaesthesiology and pain medicine at the University of Toronto, told CNN that the discrepancy could be attributed to a number of different factors.

“A lot of the older data on cannabis is based on lower doses of THC than what patients are taking now, and there is very little research on CBD,” Ladha told CNN. “The research tells us what’s happening at the population level, but at the individual level, that discussion is much more personal. The research just gives us the possibility that (cannabis) can harm sleep, but it can also help, so we just don’t know until you try it.”

“Patients are now spending money, time and resources to get cannabis to help them sleep,” – Ladha said. “I think as a medical community we need to do everything we can to empower our patients to make the best possible decisions about their health.”

You can also read other articles about cannabis and sleep and if you decide to grow your own cannabis plants, always buy good quality and fresh cannabis seeds. You can look for seeds from Nukaseeds.