A new study presented at the 2022 Anesthesiology Annual Meeting found that people who use cannabis experience more pain after surgery than those who don’t.

“Cannabis is the most commonly used illicit drug in the United States and increasingly used as an alternative treatment for chronic painbut there is limited data showing how this affects patient outcomes after surgery,” he said Elyad Ekrami, MD, lead author of the study and Clinical Research Fellow in the Outcomes Research Department at the Cleveland Clinic’s Anesthesiology Institute. “Our study shows that adults who use cannabis use more, not less, postoperative pain. Consequently, they have higher opioid use after surgery.”

The highlights of the cannabis study

Scientists examined the records of approximately 34,521 adult patients who underwent elective surgeries at the Cleveland Clinic from January 2010 to December 2020. Of them, 1,682 were cannabis users who had used the substance within a month prior to surgery. Their results compared to patients who had never used marijuana.

The results showed that patients who used marijuana experienced 14% more pain in the first 24 hours after surgery than patients who had never used it.

The authors also found that cannabis users used 7% more opioids during recovery, which they believe is not statistically important but is clinically relevant.

“The association between cannabis use, pain scores, and opioid use has been reported in smaller studies, but they had conflicting results,” Ekrami said.

“Our study has a much larger sample size and does not include patients with a chronic pain diagnosis or patients who received regional anesthesia, which would have seriously conflicted with our results. Additionally, our study groups were balanced by confounding factors such as age, gender, tobacco and other illicit drug use, and depression and mental disorders.”

Ekrami closed that further research is needed to…