Marijuana provides greater pain relief to men than Women: Study
Posted by Sagar Satapathy on August 24, 2016.
At a time when half of the states in the United States have legalized medical marijuana and several others states are on the verge of legalizing the drug through the November ballot, a new study revealed that marijuana provides greater pain relief to men than women.
Earlier, some researchers had suspected that there might be a difference in how men's and women's bodies react to medical marijuana for pain, but now they have found that men receive greater relief than women.
In the new study, researchers from the Columbia University Medical Center with the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Department of Psychiatry found that active marijuana in men significantly reduced pain, whereas active marijuana failed to decrease pain sensitivity in women, relative to inactive marijuana.
The study, published online in the journal ‘Drug and Alcohol Dependence’, examined the effect of smoking marijuana on pain sensitivity and found that, when the 42 participants, 21 male and 21 female, smoked marijuana and then sat in a cold bath for as long as they could, men experienced more pain relief than women.
The participants were required to smoke either active marijuana that contained THC, or a placebo form of the drug, which had no THC. Immediately after, they were asked to take part in a pain response test in which they submerged their hand into cold water around 4 degrees Celsius until they could no longer withstand the pain.
The study's co-author Dr. Ziva Cooper, said in a press release that the study can help shed light on how marijuana can be applied for medical purposes on both male and female, determining the efficacy of marijuana use.
“ This study underscores the importance of including both men and women in clinical trials aimed at understanding the potential therapeutic and negative effects of cannabis, particularly as more people use cannabinoid products for recreational or medical purposes”, Cooper said.
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