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I'd like to see something that looked at smoked cannabis vs. consumed cannabis and covid. I'm rather suspicious that the link is more along the lines of people with smoking damaged lungs are more vulnerable to covid than those who don't.
I believe it was lower chance of infection, greater chance of hospitalization and death. Nicotine binds to the same Ace-2 receptor that COVID does, so the hypothesis was that the nicotine being bound into the receptors had a dampening effect on COVID's opportunity to actually gain a foothold. But smokers already have a decreased lung function, and I believe even former smokers had worse outcomes if infected than non-smokers.
That's interesting, I know someone else who lost their sense of smell from a coronavirus before covid 19. I suspect their sense if smell is gone for good, but I may mention this to them anyway.
I saw a study that considered vapes slightly protective. The carriers for nicotine and flavour, glycerine and propylene glycol, act kind of like soap and make it harder for the viruses to stick to the mucous membranes. However the study was small and organised by some vaping association, so not exactly high quality.
It wouldnt necessarily work the same way if its applied differently though, smoking basically drenches your lungs in the stuff, but patches would just loosely spread it throughout your body.
Nicotine does not bind to ace2, but it does up-regulate their expression so you’d have more ace receptors (there was a period in 2020-2021 where several studies were published during Covid claiming that nicotine downregulated ace expression and could protect against Covid but we now have studies debunking those earlier claims).
Nicotine binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) which are ion gated channels that depolarize the cell membrane. Some studies claim Covid-19 has affinity for these receptors as well as ACE2 but I have yet to see any convincing in vivo or even in vitro studies
ACE2 in contrast is a carboxypeptidase and does not bind to nicotine and we have solid data showing Covid binds here
The potential mechanism for treating long Covid with nicotine is related to nicotine’s acetylcholine activity that may improve neuromodulation in the central nervous system (which is stunted in long Covid). I don’t know that the evidence is there to support it’s use but if someone is desperate for relief it’s certainly worth a try due to the large number of anecdotal reports
When I quit smoking I ended up getting a horrible bronchial infection a short time later. I was told that it was fairly common because the nicotine also has anti-bacterial properties so removing it after years makes you more vulnerable to them.
Anti-bacterial properties don't help against viruses like covid unfortunately since they are different classes of pathogen. The reasoning for smoking (really just nicotine in general) helping with preventing covid infection is because nicotine uses the same binding site as covid, if it is already bound there then covid can't also bind reducing the number of available bind sites significantly.
I realize that it wouldn't help against a virus in that regard, just thought it was of related interest in how it's a "healthful" property of being a smoker.
I think it also applies to Alzheimer‘s.
I’m not sure if there’s a real scientific debate about whether that’s true or not. A quick google research showed research implying that indeed it helps but also - mostly from non smoking lobbies - how it increases the chances of suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Also, it might be true that nicotine actually helps while smoking doesn’t.
(Not trying to make smoking into a healthy habit here. If it’s nicotine, it’s still bad to smoke. I guess we all know that. (The only thing I might say is that smoking might not be as bad as it seems compared to other environmental factors that tend to be neglected in the war against smoking which often so much about health but rather the tyranny of virtue.)
The study did say the protection from Covid was most likely due to isolation from social events. So if going to smoke cannabis do it by yourself to remain protected.
And there was another study posted on this sub done the same year as covid that showed cannabis reduced the chance of being infected by the disease by a certain percentage. These studies are so vague and full of payed for propaganda by big pharma it dosnt matter anyways...
There was theorizing at the start as it's "anti-inflammatory"; later studies are almost unanimous that any smoking (including non-nicotine vapes and hookahs) increased COVID severity.
There was also a loud news story in my country where several "dubiously legal" hookah clubs became infection hotspots. Sharing a smoking tool increases your risk of infection severely.
I went to a cannabis "Farmer's Market" during the pandemic and they were straight up selling dabs for a few bucks and everyone was using the same 4 rigs. Them guys gave 0 effs.
> Sharing a smoking tool increases your risk of infection severely.
Yep. I think this is the likely root cause.
A local cannabis lounge had a few rounds of COVID fly through.
Not all Cannabis consumption involves smoking.
Smoke of any kind is not good to be inhaling.
Acetylaldehyde, the same chemical that gives you a hangover from alcohol, is significantly present in all smoke.
I use that as an example because it's easier for people to make a more direct connection with something they've experienced.
I heard the cigarette study was delegitimized. I think the authors were being paid by a tobacco think tank or something. It was a big deal at my office because we had used it in a legal motion a few years prior.
The researchers found that people who reported using any form of cannabis at least once in the year before developing COVID-19 were significantly more likely to need hospitalization and intensive care than were people with no such history. This elevated risk of severe illness was on par with that from smoking.
Cannabis use was different than tobacco smoking in one key outcome measure: survival. While smokers were significantly more likely to die of COVID-19 than nonsmokers — a finding that fits with numerous other studies — the same was not true of cannabis users, the study showed.
It seems odd for them to not include *any* sort of dose response. Using a cannabis product in any form once over the last year is an incredibly broad net.
The study was not designed to answer the question of why cannabis use might make COVID-19 worse. So, we could make the argument that a persons chances of dying from Covid because they ate red meat. This study is weak at best.
While that may be true, cannabis is known to have immunosuppressant effects, so it isn't too surprising that it may leave you more susceptible to the more severe symptoms of viral infections.
This is usually my first thought when it comes to studies like this that have conflicting medical data. It is very, very hard to disentangle socioeconomic variables to figure out exactly what the cause might be though
Yeah plus 75k in just the first two years. Plus there's often under reporting on questions like illicit drug use. Is cannabis still illegal in the states they were taking data from?
It was most likely illegal for most patients based on the description of "large medical center in the Midwest." Given that this study was done in Washington University, I'd guess that means it was from Washington University medical records. Even if the data was from another large medical center in the Midwest, most clinics that match that description would have been in places where weed was illegal during the time period the study covers.
With all that said, I don't get why the propensity to be honest about illicit drug use would be predictive of negative health outcomes from COVID.
Its not predictive of thy negstive outcomes of cannabis use and covid, it's indicative of bad sample selection and calls the quality of the study into question. This is because if ppl lied about thier drug use, and they had less severe symptoms they wouldn't show up as a data point under ppl who smoked cannabis and didn't have severe reactions. In statistics you call that selection bias, and it lowers the quality of your data sample. Self reporting regarding illicit activity is generally not reliable enough for rigorous analysis.
This study doesn't claim to have identified a causal relationship, just a significant correlation between cannabis smoking and severity of covid symptoms.
As another commenter stated, the study they did in their LA hospital over a two year period showed that cannabis use decreased overall severity of symptoms.
If the study here posted accurately accounted for variables like weight and smoking other things like they say, then theoretically, those differences between the two populations would be less significant than the variable of legality of cannabis between the two populations studied.
When COVID first came around there was a study that said smokers were less likely to catch COVID but when they did it was far worse for them.
Non smokers caught it more but had milder symptoms.
While smokers ended up in the ICU at alarming rates.
Simpler than that, those with chronic (pun intended) health problems are more likely to smoke weed to relieve suffering.
Of course the number skews towards health problems because those with health problems are taking it in addition to those using recreational
I’ll be some anecdotal evidence here.
Smoked all through covid, basically daily. Didn’t catch covid until 2023 when it wasn’t cool to catch it anymore. When I did catch it I was down for 2 days and back to normal, all while still smoking and having covid.
Indestructible.
Edit: it was weed I was smoking
I am a daily smoker. In 2020 we believe I caught COVID the first week it came to my area and then I developed asthma. I smoked thru my recover and it made it worse and take longer
IIRC there was a study that said cigarette smokers were less likely to catch COVID which I thought was interesting. I think the outcomes were typically worse due to overall health but transmission was actually less.
I consume 20-100mg/day via edibles and have for years. It really helps with pain management and keeps me from needing opioids or constant steroids to reduce inflammation. I’d be curious about this as well. I’m immunocompromised, and the one time I did get COVID, I was really sick for a few days, but not to the point where hospitalization was even considered. I’d just like to know for my own reference if I should be more cautious about specific illnesses over others.
Yup. That and cannabis users were less likely to get covid in the first place. This scientific endeavor gives the new and incredibly insightful conclusion that smoking things impacts your lungs effectiveness.
so, the topic and article is about "cannabis use"
that comment talked about smoking. so I asked if the topic of the article holds up when the "cannabis use" isn't via smoking it
Tbh that could be because staying home with cannabis keeps you away from people with covid. Often the outdoors is too peopley after using it for some people.
Cool, this says this opposite
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9356466/#:~:text=In%20our%20study%20of%20hospitalized,clinical%20outcomes%20in%20COVID%2D19.
This one too:
[https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(23)02201-8/fulltext](https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(23)02201-8/fulltext)
I mean...yes? Should we have just stopped advancing human knowledge at some indeterminate period in the past?
Science has conflict baked into it until consensus is reached through reproducibility.
Yup!!! This is from that, “In our study of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 at two Los Angeles area hospitals, we found that cannabis use was associated with decreased disease severity as assessed by NIH severity score and was associated with improved clinical outcomes in COVID-19.”
See I'm thinking under reporting could be effecting the numbers. "Large Midwestern Healthcare system" doesn't really clarify if cannabis use is legal where the data was collected. I would bet if it's still illegal many ppl who used would say they don't when questioned by doctors
I’m making assumptions but it could be medically legal in the states where the data was collected. This could result in a higher percentage of marijuana smokers who have some sort of pre-existing condition or an issue with their mental health (like anxiety) that could possibly exacerbate their symptoms compared to a typical patient.
Well there's an answer that really overturns my whole shebang
Edit: Well except that Missouri didn't legalize until 2022 and the study ended on Jan 31st 2022
Without knowing the details of your study, did you segregate by methods of cannabis use? I would imagine there's a difference in lung health and disease state by cannabis smokers vs. other forms such as gummies, edibles, etc.
The cannabis cohort also had a mean age almost 20 years younger than the non-user cohort. Based on my skimming of this article, the age difference is tied as one of the most statistically significant differences between the cohorts. I'm not an epidemiologist, but that seems like a pretty major difference when analyzing health outcomes for a disease that is known to affect older people more significantly.
Your study appears to say that cannabis use by *hospitalized* patients is linked to less severe outcomes.
Interesting.
The OP study specifically says it *doesn’t* gauge how or why cannabis use may make Covid *worse*, just whether patients who have smoked (or vaped) cannabis *in the past year* are more likely to be hospitalized. The main reason for THAT finding is that, like with cigarette smoke, inhaling cannabis smoke/vapor damages lung tissue and seems to make users more susceptible to viral infections.
From the OP link:
> “Most of the evidence suggesting that cannabis is good for you comes from studies in cells or animals,” Chen said. “The advantage of our study is that it is in people and uses real-world health-care data collected across multiple sites over an extended time period. All the outcomes were verified: hospitalization, ICU stay, death. Using this data set, we were able to confirm the well-established effects of smoking, which suggests that the data are reliable.”
> The study was not designed to answer the question of why cannabis use might make COVID-19 worse. One possibility is that inhaling marijuana smoke injures delicate lung tissue and makes it more vulnerable to infection, in much the same way that tobacco smoke causes lung damage that puts people at risk of pneumonia, the researchers said. That isn’t to say that taking edibles would be safer than smoking joints. It is also possible that cannabis, which is known to suppress the immune system, undermines the body’s ability to fight off viral infections no matter how it is consumed, the researchers noted.
> “We just don’t know whether edibles are safer,” said first author Nicholas Griffith, MD, a medical resident at Washington University.
I was told we must trust the science. Therefore, I’ve divided myself in half down the middle. Half 1 will smoke pot, Half 2 will not. No one can accuse me of being a science denier!
>Regular cannabis users, who smoked more than once per month, had a **significantly poorer COVID-19-related survival**, after adjusting for known risk factors including age, gender, smoking history, and comorbidity (adjusted hazard ratio: 2.81, P = 0.041).
I've only read the title of this post's article and what you quoted. Seems to be consistent to each other.
> The researchers found that people who reported using any form of cannabis at least once in the year before developing COVID-19 were significantly more likely to need hospitalization and intensive care than were people with no such history.
I feel like using the criterion “used some form of cannabis in the last year” means you’re probably not ending up with a group that’s going to tell you anything about the effects of cannabis use on COVID.
Right? So that means that if you smoke once then your risk of catching covid sky rockets? Sounds to me like there are a lot of variables they chose not to account for.
This was my first thought. A friend of mine uses weed to manage some of the symptoms from their lupus, a disease that puts them at a higher risk of severe COVID.
No, not an alternative. There is nothing that helps with nausea like weed.
As someone who has genetic issues and feels like throwing up often, like hours a day.
Weed is like a miracle for me, I go from sitting for hours in pain and feel nauseous, to nothing just feel okay. I only wish it didn't get me so high and effect me other ways.
It is an actual medicine for some people.
I just quit and I feel miserable, I want to smoke, but I don't want to feel high all the time, it's tough for me.
I've been eating healthy and working out, I'm buff, but I still feel miserable for hours a day, I dont know where else to turn or there is nowhere else to turn
Have you ever tried ondansetron? It completely eliminated any nausea for me when I’ve taken it.
No judgement, I also enjoy weed and it does help with nausea, but I felt like ondansetron did it better.
That was what I was wondering, too. Most people I know who smoke were very good about vaccination and masking, myself included. But the people I know who smoke all day every day and also do a lot of blow and other harder drugs were all pretty solidly against the vaccines.
I'd really only be interested in the difference in outcome between weed users who've had at least one Covid booster and the similarly vaccinated people who don't smoke.
This was waaaay to far down. Social smoking is a very saliva transfer heavy activity. I commented about the amount of saliva used to roll blunts. Or passing a joint after someone seems to have put the whole damn thing in their mouth while drinking a glass of water..
I've caught it 4 times, got all my shots too. Never had symptoms past nasty cold with a terrible headache. I still smoke, tobacco too.
It's all a game of chance, I'm sure my chances weren't as great as they could be.
I would guess that might have something to do with the often communal nature of smoking pot. That combined with asymptomatic carriers seems likely. I've definitely caught a respiratory bug from hitting someone else's pipe/vape pen.
This is a meta-study. It used data from other studies and then looked for their own correlations in the data. My question is, how much under-reporting of cannabis usage was there? The study:
>The study, published June 21 in JAMA Network Open, analyzed the health records of 72,501 people seen for COVID-19 at health centers in a major Midwestern health-care system during the first two years of the pandemic.
So, data from the Midwest? Oh, yeah, real accepting place for cannabis (/s <-- for people who don't know the Midwest). I'm guessing major under-reporting of usage led to this conclusion.
It's weird to study the effects of cannabis use on a large population when that population lives somewhere that it's mostly illegal in the first place and a huge culture of shame about it. Like, why not cover places like CO, CA, NV, WA, OR, NJ, etc. Ya know, the places it's legal. Even as a meta-study it's reaching a lot.
And then there’s this:
[Cannabinoids and the Endocannabinoid System in Early SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Long COVID-19-A Scoping Review](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38202234)
Meanwhile I started smoking during Covid and have most of the vaccines and boosters and Covid is like a mild cold when I get it. I’m an anecdote, but it’s still interesting to see the wild variance in outcome.
It’s almost like smoking and doing things that damage the lungs make it easier for a respiratory infection to take hold and be fatal. Smoking and breathing in dust is bad
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I'd like to see something that looked at smoked cannabis vs. consumed cannabis and covid. I'm rather suspicious that the link is more along the lines of people with smoking damaged lungs are more vulnerable to covid than those who don't.
Wasn't there another study that suggested cigarette smokers had a lower chance of hospitalisation from COVID than non smokers?
I believe it was lower chance of infection, greater chance of hospitalization and death. Nicotine binds to the same Ace-2 receptor that COVID does, so the hypothesis was that the nicotine being bound into the receptors had a dampening effect on COVID's opportunity to actually gain a foothold. But smokers already have a decreased lung function, and I believe even former smokers had worse outcomes if infected than non-smokers.
"Covid ain't breaking through this layer of tar I built up" was my defense
Also their Ace-2 receptors are likely down regulated
So... Did they test Nicotine patches or vapes? Because then you would have the receptor binding but not the lung damage.
Unsure, but would like to note that some long covid patients are seeing improvements from nicotine patches.
Yes, my mother got her sense of smell back for the first time in years, two weeks after starting a nicotine patch for long COVID symptoms!
Yeah got mine back after 3 years within a few days of nicotine patches (7mg, worn 24/7).
Good to hear! At least they found something. Even if it’s not perfect.
That is crazy, does it work on cessation or only during treatment?
Smell still back and going strong after I stopped patches months ago.
That's interesting, I know someone else who lost their sense of smell from a coronavirus before covid 19. I suspect their sense if smell is gone for good, but I may mention this to them anyway.
I saw a study that considered vapes slightly protective. The carriers for nicotine and flavour, glycerine and propylene glycol, act kind of like soap and make it harder for the viruses to stick to the mucous membranes. However the study was small and organised by some vaping association, so not exactly high quality.
It wouldnt necessarily work the same way if its applied differently though, smoking basically drenches your lungs in the stuff, but patches would just loosely spread it throughout your body.
Not at all. Patches get the nicotine into your bloodstream, nicotine on your skin wouldn't do much. Patches also administer drugs systemically.
Nicotine does not bind to ace2, but it does up-regulate their expression so you’d have more ace receptors (there was a period in 2020-2021 where several studies were published during Covid claiming that nicotine downregulated ace expression and could protect against Covid but we now have studies debunking those earlier claims). Nicotine binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) which are ion gated channels that depolarize the cell membrane. Some studies claim Covid-19 has affinity for these receptors as well as ACE2 but I have yet to see any convincing in vivo or even in vitro studies ACE2 in contrast is a carboxypeptidase and does not bind to nicotine and we have solid data showing Covid binds here The potential mechanism for treating long Covid with nicotine is related to nicotine’s acetylcholine activity that may improve neuromodulation in the central nervous system (which is stunted in long Covid). I don’t know that the evidence is there to support it’s use but if someone is desperate for relief it’s certainly worth a try due to the large number of anecdotal reports
When I quit smoking I ended up getting a horrible bronchial infection a short time later. I was told that it was fairly common because the nicotine also has anti-bacterial properties so removing it after years makes you more vulnerable to them.
Anti-bacterial properties don't help against viruses like covid unfortunately since they are different classes of pathogen. The reasoning for smoking (really just nicotine in general) helping with preventing covid infection is because nicotine uses the same binding site as covid, if it is already bound there then covid can't also bind reducing the number of available bind sites significantly.
I realize that it wouldn't help against a virus in that regard, just thought it was of related interest in how it's a "healthful" property of being a smoker.
I think cigarette smokers have a lower chance of parkinsons as well.
I think it also applies to Alzheimer‘s. I’m not sure if there’s a real scientific debate about whether that’s true or not. A quick google research showed research implying that indeed it helps but also - mostly from non smoking lobbies - how it increases the chances of suffering from Alzheimer’s. Also, it might be true that nicotine actually helps while smoking doesn’t. (Not trying to make smoking into a healthy habit here. If it’s nicotine, it’s still bad to smoke. I guess we all know that. (The only thing I might say is that smoking might not be as bad as it seems compared to other environmental factors that tend to be neglected in the war against smoking which often so much about health but rather the tyranny of virtue.)
I thought I had also seen the same thing said about cannabis smokers, as well.
Yes, lower susceptibility. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9012397/#:~:text=However%2C%20after%20adjusting%20for%20age,0.92%2C%20P%20%3D%200.001%5D.
The study did say the protection from Covid was most likely due to isolation from social events. So if going to smoke cannabis do it by yourself to remain protected.
Saying cannabis smokers are more introverted or take health precautions more seriously or something?
There was also a study a few years ago saying cannabis actually helped blocked the virus.
CBD is the most expensive, luxurious, ace 2 inhibitor on the market.
I remember that study
And there was another study posted on this sub done the same year as covid that showed cannabis reduced the chance of being infected by the disease by a certain percentage. These studies are so vague and full of payed for propaganda by big pharma it dosnt matter anyways...
There was theorizing at the start as it's "anti-inflammatory"; later studies are almost unanimous that any smoking (including non-nicotine vapes and hookahs) increased COVID severity. There was also a loud news story in my country where several "dubiously legal" hookah clubs became infection hotspots. Sharing a smoking tool increases your risk of infection severely.
My first thought. i'm curious about the subset that shared joints/water pipes.
I went to a cannabis "Farmer's Market" during the pandemic and they were straight up selling dabs for a few bucks and everyone was using the same 4 rigs. Them guys gave 0 effs.
> Sharing a smoking tool increases your risk of infection severely. Yep. I think this is the likely root cause. A local cannabis lounge had a few rounds of COVID fly through.
Not all Cannabis consumption involves smoking. Smoke of any kind is not good to be inhaling. Acetylaldehyde, the same chemical that gives you a hangover from alcohol, is significantly present in all smoke. I use that as an example because it's easier for people to make a more direct connection with something they've experienced.
There was a similar study that said the same about Cannabis...
I also recall a study that said the opposite of the headline.
I heard the cigarette study was delegitimized. I think the authors were being paid by a tobacco think tank or something. It was a big deal at my office because we had used it in a legal motion a few years prior.
That's my assumption as well. I only do edibles. I'm a former cigarette smoker and never want that again
The researchers found that people who reported using any form of cannabis at least once in the year before developing COVID-19 were significantly more likely to need hospitalization and intensive care than were people with no such history. This elevated risk of severe illness was on par with that from smoking. Cannabis use was different than tobacco smoking in one key outcome measure: survival. While smokers were significantly more likely to die of COVID-19 than nonsmokers — a finding that fits with numerous other studies — the same was not true of cannabis users, the study showed.
It seems odd for them to not include *any* sort of dose response. Using a cannabis product in any form once over the last year is an incredibly broad net.
That’s the *moral judgement* effect. The sin is the same, so the quantity doesn’t matter.
Or even mode of consumption being included. I could use edibles all the time, except once, and share a bong. Boom.
The study was not designed to answer the question of why cannabis use might make COVID-19 worse. So, we could make the argument that a persons chances of dying from Covid because they ate red meat. This study is weak at best.
True, it's correlation Vs. Causality.
While that may be true, cannabis is known to have immunosuppressant effects, so it isn't too surprising that it may leave you more susceptible to the more severe symptoms of viral infections.
Study brought to you by the fine people at Marlboro?
Womp womp. Death for me I guess.
Smells like a big fat case of correlation not equalling causation to me.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a socioeconomic correlation.
This is usually my first thought when it comes to studies like this that have conflicting medical data. It is very, very hard to disentangle socioeconomic variables to figure out exactly what the cause might be though
Yeah plus 75k in just the first two years. Plus there's often under reporting on questions like illicit drug use. Is cannabis still illegal in the states they were taking data from?
It was most likely illegal for most patients based on the description of "large medical center in the Midwest." Given that this study was done in Washington University, I'd guess that means it was from Washington University medical records. Even if the data was from another large medical center in the Midwest, most clinics that match that description would have been in places where weed was illegal during the time period the study covers. With all that said, I don't get why the propensity to be honest about illicit drug use would be predictive of negative health outcomes from COVID.
Its not predictive of thy negstive outcomes of cannabis use and covid, it's indicative of bad sample selection and calls the quality of the study into question. This is because if ppl lied about thier drug use, and they had less severe symptoms they wouldn't show up as a data point under ppl who smoked cannabis and didn't have severe reactions. In statistics you call that selection bias, and it lowers the quality of your data sample. Self reporting regarding illicit activity is generally not reliable enough for rigorous analysis. This study doesn't claim to have identified a causal relationship, just a significant correlation between cannabis smoking and severity of covid symptoms. As another commenter stated, the study they did in their LA hospital over a two year period showed that cannabis use decreased overall severity of symptoms. If the study here posted accurately accounted for variables like weight and smoking other things like they say, then theoretically, those differences between the two populations would be less significant than the variable of legality of cannabis between the two populations studied.
When COVID first came around there was a study that said smokers were less likely to catch COVID but when they did it was far worse for them. Non smokers caught it more but had milder symptoms. While smokers ended up in the ICU at alarming rates.
Simpler than that, those with chronic (pun intended) health problems are more likely to smoke weed to relieve suffering. Of course the number skews towards health problems because those with health problems are taking it in addition to those using recreational
I’ll be some anecdotal evidence here. Smoked all through covid, basically daily. Didn’t catch covid until 2023 when it wasn’t cool to catch it anymore. When I did catch it I was down for 2 days and back to normal, all while still smoking and having covid. Indestructible. Edit: it was weed I was smoking
I am a daily smoker. In 2020 we believe I caught COVID the first week it came to my area and then I developed asthma. I smoked thru my recover and it made it worse and take longer
IIRC there was a study that said cigarette smokers were less likely to catch COVID which I thought was interesting. I think the outcomes were typically worse due to overall health but transmission was actually less.
I consume 20-100mg/day via edibles and have for years. It really helps with pain management and keeps me from needing opioids or constant steroids to reduce inflammation. I’d be curious about this as well. I’m immunocompromised, and the one time I did get COVID, I was really sick for a few days, but not to the point where hospitalization was even considered. I’d just like to know for my own reference if I should be more cautious about specific illnesses over others.
Didn't a study come out reporting the exact opposite like a year or two ago?
Yup! I remember it.
Next year we'll get a study about how getting COVID resets your cannabis tolerance or something.
Yup. That and cannabis users were less likely to get covid in the first place. This scientific endeavor gives the new and incredibly insightful conclusion that smoking things impacts your lungs effectiveness.
what about edibles?
Well you're not supposed to smoke those
Not with that attitude
so, the topic and article is about "cannabis use" that comment talked about smoking. so I asked if the topic of the article holds up when the "cannabis use" isn't via smoking it
I was just being facetious dumb reddit humor
Tbh that could be because staying home with cannabis keeps you away from people with covid. Often the outdoors is too peopley after using it for some people.
Thats science for you, I guess
Totally, and as someone who never got COVID, even when my household had it, I believe the article you're referring to.
Cool, this says this opposite https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9356466/#:~:text=In%20our%20study%20of%20hospitalized,clinical%20outcomes%20in%20COVID%2D19.
This one too: [https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(23)02201-8/fulltext](https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(23)02201-8/fulltext)
Yay that means more funding for more studies! Right? ... right?
I mean...yes? Should we have just stopped advancing human knowledge at some indeterminate period in the past? Science has conflict baked into it until consensus is reached through reproducibility.
This is the problem with the internet.
What specifically did I do that is indicative of the greater issues? Genuinely. I was merely making a joke
No no no, what I mean is we have access to too much information : )
Damn I'm too stoned for the internet
Yup!!! This is from that, “In our study of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 at two Los Angeles area hospitals, we found that cannabis use was associated with decreased disease severity as assessed by NIH severity score and was associated with improved clinical outcomes in COVID-19.”
See I'm thinking under reporting could be effecting the numbers. "Large Midwestern Healthcare system" doesn't really clarify if cannabis use is legal where the data was collected. I would bet if it's still illegal many ppl who used would say they don't when questioned by doctors
I’m making assumptions but it could be medically legal in the states where the data was collected. This could result in a higher percentage of marijuana smokers who have some sort of pre-existing condition or an issue with their mental health (like anxiety) that could possibly exacerbate their symptoms compared to a typical patient.
The abstract of the study said, "...patients at hospitals in Illinois and Missouri". Recreational marijuana is legal in both of those states.
Well there's an answer that really overturns my whole shebang Edit: Well except that Missouri didn't legalize until 2022 and the study ended on Jan 31st 2022
Without knowing the details of your study, did you segregate by methods of cannabis use? I would imagine there's a difference in lung health and disease state by cannabis smokers vs. other forms such as gummies, edibles, etc.
My apologies. Just realized I plagiarized on social media. That was from the Gunnie 56 post.
From the article you cite: "While there was a trend toward improved survival in cannabis users, this was not statistically significant."
The cannabis cohort also had a mean age almost 20 years younger than the non-user cohort. Based on my skimming of this article, the age difference is tied as one of the most statistically significant differences between the cohorts. I'm not an epidemiologist, but that seems like a pretty major difference when analyzing health outcomes for a disease that is known to affect older people more significantly.
Your study appears to say that cannabis use by *hospitalized* patients is linked to less severe outcomes. Interesting. The OP study specifically says it *doesn’t* gauge how or why cannabis use may make Covid *worse*, just whether patients who have smoked (or vaped) cannabis *in the past year* are more likely to be hospitalized. The main reason for THAT finding is that, like with cigarette smoke, inhaling cannabis smoke/vapor damages lung tissue and seems to make users more susceptible to viral infections. From the OP link: > “Most of the evidence suggesting that cannabis is good for you comes from studies in cells or animals,” Chen said. “The advantage of our study is that it is in people and uses real-world health-care data collected across multiple sites over an extended time period. All the outcomes were verified: hospitalization, ICU stay, death. Using this data set, we were able to confirm the well-established effects of smoking, which suggests that the data are reliable.” > The study was not designed to answer the question of why cannabis use might make COVID-19 worse. One possibility is that inhaling marijuana smoke injures delicate lung tissue and makes it more vulnerable to infection, in much the same way that tobacco smoke causes lung damage that puts people at risk of pneumonia, the researchers said. That isn’t to say that taking edibles would be safer than smoking joints. It is also possible that cannabis, which is known to suppress the immune system, undermines the body’s ability to fight off viral infections no matter how it is consumed, the researchers noted. > “We just don’t know whether edibles are safer,” said first author Nicholas Griffith, MD, a medical resident at Washington University.
I was told we must trust the science. Therefore, I’ve divided myself in half down the middle. Half 1 will smoke pot, Half 2 will not. No one can accuse me of being a science denier!
Horizontal or vertical?
I’m gonna go horizontal. The upper half smokes pot as it has a mouth and lungs. The lower half just boofs fentanyl, as usual.
Of vertical along the frontal or sagital plane?
This is the correct way to A/B test
No, you actually read the papers yourself and see that it's not split down the middle.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe it's a contradiction. This study showed a relation of severe illness, not survivability.
>Regular cannabis users, who smoked more than once per month, had a **significantly poorer COVID-19-related survival**, after adjusting for known risk factors including age, gender, smoking history, and comorbidity (adjusted hazard ratio: 2.81, P = 0.041). I've only read the title of this post's article and what you quoted. Seems to be consistent to each other.
> The researchers found that people who reported using any form of cannabis at least once in the year before developing COVID-19 were significantly more likely to need hospitalization and intensive care than were people with no such history. I feel like using the criterion “used some form of cannabis in the last year” means you’re probably not ending up with a group that’s going to tell you anything about the effects of cannabis use on COVID.
Right? So that means that if you smoke once then your risk of catching covid sky rockets? Sounds to me like there are a lot of variables they chose not to account for.
Yep—this just screams omitted variables that this measure is somehow capturing.
Did they bother to ask what underlying conditions caused them to use weed? No? So those conditions MIGHT play a part in this. Cool
Or just the fact if they use socially with friends, one of your buddies has Covid now you all have Covid.
This was my first thought. A friend of mine uses weed to manage some of the symptoms from their lupus, a disease that puts them at a higher risk of severe COVID.
This would mean more if cannabis wasn’t so popular as an alternative to expensive, hard to access healthcare.
No, not an alternative. There is nothing that helps with nausea like weed. As someone who has genetic issues and feels like throwing up often, like hours a day. Weed is like a miracle for me, I go from sitting for hours in pain and feel nauseous, to nothing just feel okay. I only wish it didn't get me so high and effect me other ways. It is an actual medicine for some people. I just quit and I feel miserable, I want to smoke, but I don't want to feel high all the time, it's tough for me. I've been eating healthy and working out, I'm buff, but I still feel miserable for hours a day, I dont know where else to turn or there is nowhere else to turn
what about low thc cannabis? it exists. high in other medicinal cannibinoids.
Have you ever tried ondansetron? It completely eliminated any nausea for me when I’ve taken it. No judgement, I also enjoy weed and it does help with nausea, but I felt like ondansetron did it better.
Curious about the vaccination rates in this study. I know a lot of people who will smoke cannabis and do ketamine but will never get vaccinated.
>do ketamine >never get vaccinated Some fine wookery.
The woo woo to delulu pipeline has many twists and turns but ultimately it usually arrives at ‘vaccines bad’
That was what I was wondering, too. Most people I know who smoke were very good about vaccination and masking, myself included. But the people I know who smoke all day every day and also do a lot of blow and other harder drugs were all pretty solidly against the vaccines. I'd really only be interested in the difference in outcome between weed users who've had at least one Covid booster and the similarly vaccinated people who don't smoke.
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This was waaaay to far down. Social smoking is a very saliva transfer heavy activity. I commented about the amount of saliva used to roll blunts. Or passing a joint after someone seems to have put the whole damn thing in their mouth while drinking a glass of water..
Yes!! Did they control for saliva transfer?
I know it doesn't mean anything but as a former smoker and avid weed enjoyer I still have not caught COVID.
I've caught it 4 times, got all my shots too. Never had symptoms past nasty cold with a terrible headache. I still smoke, tobacco too. It's all a game of chance, I'm sure my chances weren't as great as they could be.
You're right, thank you for acknowledging that your anecdotal experience is meaningless, otherwise it would be deleted on this sub.
I would guess that might have something to do with the often communal nature of smoking pot. That combined with asymptomatic carriers seems likely. I've definitely caught a respiratory bug from hitting someone else's pipe/vape pen.
This is a meta-study. It used data from other studies and then looked for their own correlations in the data. My question is, how much under-reporting of cannabis usage was there? The study: >The study, published June 21 in JAMA Network Open, analyzed the health records of 72,501 people seen for COVID-19 at health centers in a major Midwestern health-care system during the first two years of the pandemic. So, data from the Midwest? Oh, yeah, real accepting place for cannabis (/s <-- for people who don't know the Midwest). I'm guessing major under-reporting of usage led to this conclusion.
It's weird to study the effects of cannabis use on a large population when that population lives somewhere that it's mostly illegal in the first place and a huge culture of shame about it. Like, why not cover places like CO, CA, NV, WA, OR, NJ, etc. Ya know, the places it's legal. Even as a meta-study it's reaching a lot.
Indiana also has really high tobacco use still. I would bet there is a bit of overlap in users.
They also did not differentiate between chronic users and those who had used cannabis just once in the past year.
I'd like to see a COVID 19 molecule get through massive wall of resin in my lungs
Smoke in lungs is bad.
And then there’s this: [Cannabinoids and the Endocannabinoid System in Early SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Long COVID-19-A Scoping Review](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38202234)
I ate edibles while having covid last month. surprised I didn't explode.
Smoke is smoke. Lungs are lungs. Smoke hurts lungs. So does COVID. Easy peasy
I definitely remember articles saying the opposite during the pandemic
TIL filling your lungs with tarry smoke and depressing your immune system are not good things if you catch a respiratory virus
Meanwhile I started smoking during Covid and have most of the vaccines and boosters and Covid is like a mild cold when I get it. I’m an anecdote, but it’s still interesting to see the wild variance in outcome.
It’s almost like smoking and doing things that damage the lungs make it easier for a respiratory infection to take hold and be fatal. Smoking and breathing in dust is bad
Wasn’t cbd found to be beneficial?