A recent study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, researchers have studied the effects of cannabis on stress, anxiety, and depression. The team of researchers at the Washington State University has also pointed out that it depends on what type of marijuana is being smoked. Some types can cause negative side effects for long durations.
Treating Symptoms of Anxiety, Depression, and Stress
The data used by the researchers was collected from the Stainprint app. The application is used by medical marijuana users that rate how good they feel after smoking different types of cannabis in different doses.
The users rate how their symptoms are before using cannabis on a scale of 1 to 10 and then they will enter the type of marijuana they smoked. Then, 20 minutes later, they will add information on how many puffs they took and how they rate their symptoms at that moment when the effect of the marijuana smoking is taking place.
After the WSU researchers gathered a total of 12,000 Stainprint entries, they used statistics to see how marijuana affected cases of stress, anxiety and depression levels in the users.
Reducing Symptoms in Short Time But Causing Long-Term Negative Effects
The results showed that after two puffs of any kind of cannabis, anxiety symptoms were reduced. One puff of a high CBD and low THC lowered levels of depression and about 10 puffs of high CBD and high THC relieved stress.
In short time, cannabis showed that it was good at alleviating all the symptoms. But patients also reported that the depression symptoms increased in long-term. researchers believe that overusing cannabis is also linked to mood disorders.
At the moment, this study is the first of its kind, in researching different types of marijuana. They stated that they will need to conduct more research to validate their results. There is also the issue of self-reported data, which may not be accurate at times. Moreover, the data on THC and CBD content in cannabis could not be entirely accurate either.
Doris’s passion for writing started to take shape in college where she was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Even though she ended up working in IT for more than 7 years, she’s now back to what he always enjoyed doing. With a true passion for technology, Doris mostly covers tech-related topics.