7 ms·

Harvard Study: CBD May Significantly Reduce Anxiety with Minimal Side Effects

35 points by DemiGuru 4y ago

Garrrrrr 4y ago
> 14 outpatients....
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
currio 4y ago
Link to the actual study page on nih. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36352103/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36352103/ Relveant summary: "Cannabidiol (CBD) is a compound found within the Cannabis sativa plant. Previous studies suggest CBD may reduce anxiety. In this clinical trial, 14 patients with anxiety were treated for four-weeks with a cannabis-derived study product with high levels of CBD, administered under their tongue 3 times each day. All patients knew that they were being given CBD. Following four weeks of treatment, patients reported reduced anxiety as well as improvements in mood, sleep, quality of life, and measures reflecting their self-control and ability to think flexibly. Patients did not experience any serious negative effects during the trial. The impact of this product is now being evaluated in more patients with anxiety."
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  14 people, and it wasn't blind? That's pretty poor quality.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    I’d call it absolutely useless.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      It's really hard to trust anything about weed as a medicine because almost all of it is extremely biased by either strong interests to commercialize weed, or standard pharma companies trying to prevent anyone from coming between them and their opiod users. Interested academics simply haven't been allowed to do actual studies.
  - modeless 4y ago
    No control group, and the only results are self-reported. Someone ought to establish some kind of trustworthiness rating system that penalizes institutions and researchers for publishing this kind of trash. I was going to also criticize the journalist but they actually included the abstract and links to the actual study which is above and beyond what most do. It doesn't excuse publishing headlines like this though.
    - formerly_proven 4y ago
      hARvaRd sTuDY
    - themitigating 4y ago
      Not debating your other concerns but for mental health isn't self reporting really the only option?
      - modeless 4y ago
        No, interviews are the standard, which is not the same as a self-reporting questionnaire.
davidguetta 4y ago
- mmastrac 4y ago
  Your comment is ridiculously uninformed, and based on tropes that have been around for years and completely debunked. CBD is not addictive. Anxiety is not a normal state. Treating anxiety is not an escape and is medically necessary for many people. You _really_ need to inform yourself.
- Lucasoato 4y ago
  This is exactly the comment I’d expect by someone who tells to a severely depressed person to “just go out and be happy”.
- ketzo 4y ago
  Nervousness and rational fear =\= generalized anxiety disorder.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Anxiety ISN'T a normal emotion, but my brain is physically and physiologically broken to produce irrational anxiety for perfectly normal and expected situations, and puts me in fight or flight mode for the most benign things. But I take a low dose of lexipro. Now I have normal and controllable responses to stressful situations and am NORMAL. Your characterization of this as essentially drugging yourself to forget anxiety is disgusting, inflammatory, and beyond inaccurate, and what's more is that people pushing such a stupid and unreasonable take are a HUGE hindrance to people seeking care. I used to be afraid that drugs would "make me a different person" but no, in the same way a person with diabetes using supplemental insulin isn't "changing who they are", my brain is broken, and this medication can help to patch the hole. SSRIs aren't freakin benzos. CBD isn't a hallucinogen. Go reevaluate some things.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- gtirloni 4y ago
mmastrac 4y ago
I thought this was pretty well-known already, but good to see it being studied. Pure CBD is probably one of the most effective anti-anxiety compounds out there, with zero effects other than "less anxious".
superkuh 4y ago
Lets be clear here: CBD is not a CB1 or CB2 agonist (or antagonist, or anything else). It is active at the serotonin-1a autoreceptor (like buspirone) as a partial agonist and then only at dosages that are infeasibly expensive at current market pricing. An adult human typically requires multiple 0.3 to 0.6 gram (that's 600 milligram) doses per day to reach a physiologically active level. Dosing and pricing it like THC is simply placebo. It is not THC. This study is based off obviously false premises.
- mtreis86 4y ago
  At $2 or less per gram it would be much cheaper than plenty of pharma products. https://www.crescentcanna.com/product/cbd-isolate-powder/ https://www.crescentcanna.com/product/cbd-isolate-powder/
  - superkuh 4y ago
    It's good to see this. Just a handful of years ago it was priced the same as THC so a gram would be hundreds of dollars.
- bgilly 4y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. I’ve been looking for useful dosing data for years and haven’t found any. Do you have any references for the dosing data that you’ve mentioned?
  - superkuh 4y ago
    I can't find the ones I'm remembering (where the researchers actually complained about price) but basically just look at any human study of CBD re: anxiety in a reputable scientific journal and 300-600mg is the baseline. ie, https://www.nature.com/articles/npp20116 https://www.nature.com/articles/npp20116 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0269881110379283 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026988111037928...
- themitigating 4y ago
  Can you provide a rough estimate of how much it would cost for one dose?
hlk 4y ago
How is "increased energy" a side effect?
- riley_dog 4y ago
  How is it not a side effect? Side effects don't have to be negative.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  By not being the primary effect, it has no choice but to be a side effect
endisneigh 4y ago
drinking water does significantly reduce anxiety and has no side effects
- gtirloni 4y ago
  citation?
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    there are tons, but here's one: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Voluntary-Dehydration-and-Cognitive-Performance-in-D%27Anci-Mahoney/92f85966741b9107e6a73153e9d61cba950cefb5?p2df https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Voluntary-Dehydration-... many people are actually not drinking enough water.
agumonkey 4y ago
Sorry to hijack the thread, CBD has been studied as potential adjuvant for cancer (here's one lab that did multiple studies https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=McAllister+SD&cauthor_id=25916739 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=McAllister+SD&cauthor_...) allegedly due to inhibition of some genes that caused metastasis. Yet some scientists have data on negative effects on chemotherapy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hG6lvLB0kQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hG6lvLB0kQ At best it would mean, antitumoral benefits can be gained before and after chemo, but I'm not sure. If anybody is knowledgeable on this topic, hit me up.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Methods: For the open-label stage of clinical trial NCT02548559, autoregressive linear modeling assessed efficacy and tolerability of four-weeks of 1 mL t.i.d. treatment with a full-spectrum, high-CBD sublingual solution (9.97 mg/mL CBD, 0.23 mg/mL Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) in 14 outpatients with moderate-to-severe anxiety, defined as ≥16 on the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) or ≥11 on the Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS). Sorry, but mental health studies without a placebo control group are useless. It's well known that placebo groups have a very strong response in these studies. Unless you have a control group, you have no idea if the effects are due to the active drug or due to involvement in the study. Also, it doesn't make sense for them to use a THC-inclusive blend and then attribute the effects entirely to CBD. The amount of THC consumed by patients per day was about 0.7mg sublingually. That's not enough to get people "high" but it is enough to be relevant for the drug's effects. This is not a good study. I'm surprised to see this attached to Harvard.
- throwoutway 4y ago
  Is there no recourse at Harvard for publishing terrible studies? People pretend the elite colleges are better but it seems to not be the case
spike021 4y ago
I tried CBD a few times for my Essential Tremor, since it was a recommended form of home treatment. Didn't help that at all and I can't recall feeling any calmer about anything while using it. I've also given CBD treats to my dog and his behavior usually doesn't change. Really makes me wonder if CBD by itself is just a placebo thing or only really helps a small subset of people.
- joemazerino 4y ago
  How much CBD were you taking?
- ssnistfajen 4y ago
  A lot of these studies gave their test subjects CBD in dosages of several hundred miligrams at once. In oil form that's often entire bottles ($30-50 per legal product in my jurisdiction). So it's basically financially infeasible for anyone to self-medicate with CBD unless they get it from prescriptions for an actual medically diagnosed condition.
  - akvadrako 4y ago
    I've tried taking a bottle of CBD oil, which is only a few euros here from the drug store. The main issue is it makes you high in some way, so definitely not without side effects. No idea how they work around that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

35 points by DemiGuru 4y ago

Garrrrrr 4y ago

> 14 outpatients....

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

currio 4y ago

Link to the actual study page on nih. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36352103/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36352103/ Relveant summary: "Cannabidiol (CBD) is a compound found within the Cannabis sativa plant. Previous studies suggest CBD may reduce anxiety. In this clinical trial, 14 patients with anxiety were treated for four-weeks with a cannabis-derived study product with high levels of CBD, administered under their tongue 3 times each day. All patients knew that they were being given CBD. Following four weeks of treatment, patients reported reduced anxiety as well as improvements in mood, sleep, quality of life, and measures reflecting their self-control and ability to think flexibly. Patients did not experience any serious negative effects during the trial. The impact of this product is now being evaluated in more patients with anxiety."

mrguyorama 4y ago
14 people, and it wasn't blind? That's pretty poor quality.
- Auracle 4y ago
  I’d call it absolutely useless.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    It's really hard to trust anything about weed as a medicine because almost all of it is extremely biased by either strong interests to commercialize weed, or standard pharma companies trying to prevent anyone from coming between them and their opiod users. Interested academics simply haven't been allowed to do actual studies.
- modeless 4y ago
  No control group, and the only results are self-reported. Someone ought to establish some kind of trustworthiness rating system that penalizes institutions and researchers for publishing this kind of trash. I was going to also criticize the journalist but they actually included the abstract and links to the actual study which is above and beyond what most do. It doesn't excuse publishing headlines like this though.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    hARvaRd sTuDY
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Not debating your other concerns but for mental health isn't self reporting really the only option?
    - modeless 4y ago
      No, interviews are the standard, which is not the same as a self-reporting questionnaire.

davidguetta 4y ago

mmastrac 4y ago
Your comment is ridiculously uninformed, and based on tropes that have been around for years and completely debunked. CBD is not addictive. Anxiety is not a normal state. Treating anxiety is not an escape and is medically necessary for many people. You _really_ need to inform yourself.
Lucasoato 4y ago
This is exactly the comment I’d expect by someone who tells to a severely depressed person to “just go out and be happy”.
ketzo 4y ago
Nervousness and rational fear =\= generalized anxiety disorder.
mrguyorama 4y ago
Anxiety ISN'T a normal emotion, but my brain is physically and physiologically broken to produce irrational anxiety for perfectly normal and expected situations, and puts me in fight or flight mode for the most benign things. But I take a low dose of lexipro. Now I have normal and controllable responses to stressful situations and am NORMAL. Your characterization of this as essentially drugging yourself to forget anxiety is disgusting, inflammatory, and beyond inaccurate, and what's more is that people pushing such a stupid and unreasonable take are a HUGE hindrance to people seeking care. I used to be afraid that drugs would "make me a different person" but no, in the same way a person with diabetes using supplemental insulin isn't "changing who they are", my brain is broken, and this medication can help to patch the hole. SSRIs aren't freakin benzos. CBD isn't a hallucinogen. Go reevaluate some things.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gtirloni 4y ago

mmastrac 4y ago

I thought this was pretty well-known already, but good to see it being studied. Pure CBD is probably one of the most effective anti-anxiety compounds out there, with zero effects other than "less anxious".

superkuh 4y ago

Lets be clear here: CBD is not a CB1 or CB2 agonist (or antagonist, or anything else). It is active at the serotonin-1a autoreceptor (like buspirone) as a partial agonist and then only at dosages that are infeasibly expensive at current market pricing. An adult human typically requires multiple 0.3 to 0.6 gram (that's 600 milligram) doses per day to reach a physiologically active level. Dosing and pricing it like THC is simply placebo. It is not THC. This study is based off obviously false premises.

mtreis86 4y ago
At $2 or less per gram it would be much cheaper than plenty of pharma products. https://www.crescentcanna.com/product/cbd-isolate-powder/ https://www.crescentcanna.com/product/cbd-isolate-powder/
- superkuh 4y ago
  It's good to see this. Just a handful of years ago it was priced the same as THC so a gram would be hundreds of dollars.
bgilly 4y ago
Thank you for sharing this. I’ve been looking for useful dosing data for years and haven’t found any. Do you have any references for the dosing data that you’ve mentioned?
- superkuh 4y ago
  I can't find the ones I'm remembering (where the researchers actually complained about price) but basically just look at any human study of CBD re: anxiety in a reputable scientific journal and 300-600mg is the baseline. ie, https://www.nature.com/articles/npp20116 https://www.nature.com/articles/npp20116 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0269881110379283 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026988111037928...
themitigating 4y ago
Can you provide a rough estimate of how much it would cost for one dose?

hlk 4y ago

How is "increased energy" a side effect?

riley_dog 4y ago
How is it not a side effect? Side effects don't have to be negative.
birdyrooster 4y ago
By not being the primary effect, it has no choice but to be a side effect

endisneigh 4y ago

drinking water does significantly reduce anxiety and has no side effects

gtirloni 4y ago
citation?
- endisneigh 4y ago
  there are tons, but here's one: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Voluntary-Dehydration-and-Cognitive-Performance-in-D%27Anci-Mahoney/92f85966741b9107e6a73153e9d61cba950cefb5?p2df https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Voluntary-Dehydration-... many people are actually not drinking enough water.

agumonkey 4y ago

Sorry to hijack the thread, CBD has been studied as potential adjuvant for cancer (here's one lab that did multiple studies https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=McAllister+SD&cauthor_id=25916739 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=McAllister+SD&cauthor_...) allegedly due to inhibition of some genes that caused metastasis. Yet some scientists have data on negative effects on chemotherapy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hG6lvLB0kQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hG6lvLB0kQ At best it would mean, antitumoral benefits can be gained before and after chemo, but I'm not sure. If anybody is knowledgeable on this topic, hit me up.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> Methods: For the open-label stage of clinical trial NCT02548559, autoregressive linear modeling assessed efficacy and tolerability of four-weeks of 1 mL t.i.d. treatment with a full-spectrum, high-CBD sublingual solution (9.97 mg/mL CBD, 0.23 mg/mL Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) in 14 outpatients with moderate-to-severe anxiety, defined as ≥16 on the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) or ≥11 on the Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS). Sorry, but mental health studies without a placebo control group are useless. It's well known that placebo groups have a very strong response in these studies. Unless you have a control group, you have no idea if the effects are due to the active drug or due to involvement in the study. Also, it doesn't make sense for them to use a THC-inclusive blend and then attribute the effects entirely to CBD. The amount of THC consumed by patients per day was about 0.7mg sublingually. That's not enough to get people "high" but it is enough to be relevant for the drug's effects. This is not a good study. I'm surprised to see this attached to Harvard.

throwoutway 4y ago
Is there no recourse at Harvard for publishing terrible studies? People pretend the elite colleges are better but it seems to not be the case

spike021 4y ago

I tried CBD a few times for my Essential Tremor, since it was a recommended form of home treatment. Didn't help that at all and I can't recall feeling any calmer about anything while using it. I've also given CBD treats to my dog and his behavior usually doesn't change. Really makes me wonder if CBD by itself is just a placebo thing or only really helps a small subset of people.

joemazerino 4y ago
How much CBD were you taking?
ssnistfajen 4y ago
A lot of these studies gave their test subjects CBD in dosages of several hundred miligrams at once. In oil form that's often entire bottles ($30-50 per legal product in my jurisdiction). So it's basically financially infeasible for anyone to self-medicate with CBD unless they get it from prescriptions for an actual medically diagnosed condition.
- akvadrako 4y ago
  I've tried taking a bottle of CBD oil, which is only a few euros here from the drug store. The main issue is it makes you high in some way, so definitely not without side effects. No idea how they work around that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]