The team of New York-based scientists suggests CBD may have a potential role in helping to break the cycle of addiction.
By Shamard Charles, M.D. and Ali Galante
Add the possibility of reducing cravings and anxiety in heroin addicts to the growing list of potential CBD uses.
Researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York announced Tuesday that results of a small study
found a promising, and unexpected, new use of CBD: a reduction of
cue-induced cravings and anxiety in individuals with a history of heroin
abuse, suggesting a potential role for it in helping to break heroin drug addiction.
The results of the study are published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
“To
address the critical need for new treatment options for the millions of
people and families who are being devastated by this epidemic, we
initiated a study to assess the potential of a nonintoxicating cannabinoid
on craving and anxiety in heroin-addicted individuals,” said lead study
author Yasmin Hurd, director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai
in a statement.
“The specific effects of CBD on
cue-induced drug craving and anxiety are particularly important in the
development of addiction therapeutics because environmental cues are one
of the strongest triggers for relapse and continued drug use.”
Hurd
and her team at Mount Sinai previously studied the effects of CBD in
animals on heroin. They found that CBD reduced the animals’ tendency to
use heroin in response to a drug-associated cue, so they decided to
study the drug’s effects on humans.
The
researchers looked at 42 drug-abstinent men and women — ages 21 to 65 —
with heroin use disorder. Half of the group, who had recently stopped
using heroin, received CBD — 400 mg or 800 mg once daily — and the other
half received a placebo. Participants were then exposed to neutral and
drug-related cues during the course of three sessions: immediately
following administration, 24 hours after CBD or placebo administration,
and seven days after the third and final daily CBD or placebo
administration.
They found that those who received CBD
had significantly reduced drug cravings. They also found that the
participants reported less anxiety when looking at pictures of people
using drugs. Moreover, CBD seemed to have a lasting effect — the drug
continued to reduce cravings and anxiety for seven days, well beyond the
time the drug is expected to be present in the body.
Vital
signs including skin temperature, blood pressure, heart rate,
respiratory rate and oxygen saturation were obtained at different times
during the sessions. To the researchers' surprise they found that CBD
reduced heart rate and salivary cortisol levels, which typically
increase when anxiety provoking images are shown to addicts. This
objective finding further supported Hurd’s idea that CBD may be a
promising tool in helping to curb opioid addiction.
“Cravings
and anxiety are very subjective effects. One of the things people can
do is trick themselves. That’s why we measured their physiological
responses. These drug cues increase heroin users’ heart rates and the
levels of cortisol so we know it’s not subjective because with the CBD
their heart rates and levels of cortisol decreased — that’s really
important,” Hurd told NBC News.
Still, without more
research it is impossible to prove if the findings were due to the use
of CBD alone, a combination of multiple factors, or by other factors
entirely.
Drug overdose deaths
rose above 70,000 in 2017, a record high and an increase of almost 10
percent from the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. Young adults and teens have been hit hardest by
the opioid epidemic. In fact, death rates among younger adults have
risen so much that they have reduced the overall life expectancy for the
U.S. population as a whole.
We’re
too slow to address addiction in our society. When the flu comes up and
the measles comes up, we have so many people trying to help. But we
don’t have the same kind of urgency with addiction.
Many experts believe that with limited non-opioid medication options, the need for new alternatives is more important than ever.
“We’re
in the middle of a huge movement in CBD research, but the Mount Sinai
study is not the first,” said Dr. Danesh Alam, medical director of
behavioral health at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital, who
was not involved in the study. “We’ve seen results like this from
studies done in the heroin population in 2015-16. There are many
chemicals found in marijuana including CBD that need to be studied
further, but the restrictions on marijuana research have set us back.”
Alam
notes that conducting research in the field of addiction increases the
challenge of finding pharmacological solutions to addiction.
“We’re
too slow to address addiction in our society. When the flu comes up and
the measles comes up, we have so many people trying to help. But we
don’t have the same kind of urgency with addiction,” Hurd told NBC News.
“A
successful nonopioid medication would add significantly to the existing
addiction medication toolbox to help reduce the growing death toll and
enormous health care costs.”
Previous studies in animals suggest that it might help with anxiety, pain and inflammation.
Even further, recent studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
showed that in states where people could legally use marijuana, the
number of filled opioid prescriptions dropped significantly, and there
were lower rates of opioid overdose and death, compared with states without legal cannabis.
This
growing body of research adds to be an increasingly popular belief in
the scientific community that CBD may have broad medicinal value in the
fields of pain management, addiction medicine, and neurology.
“In addition to epilepsy
one thing that’s been replicated over and over is anxiety,” Hurd said.
“I don’t think this is just drug-induced anxiety; I think it’s anxiety
in general.”
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