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London, United Kingdom: Patients with refractory epilepsy report sustained improvements in their symptoms following the use of medical cannabis preparations, according to observational data published in the journal Brain and Behavior.
British investigators assessed the use of cannabis-based medicinal products (CBMPs) in a cohort of 134 patients with treatment-resistant epilepsy. (British health care providers may prescribe cannabis-based medicinal products to patients unresponsive to conventional medications.) Patients’ outcomes were assessed at one, three, and six months.
Medical cannabis treatment was associated with improvements in patient‐reported epilepsy‐specific outcomes, alongside improvements in anxiety, sleep quality, and health-related quality of life. Over 96 percent of study subjects reported no adverse events from cannabis treatment.
“Treatment with CBMPs was associated with an improvement in both epilepsy‐specific and general HRQoL [health-related quality of life] outcomes at one, three, and six months,” the study’s authors concluded. “This study shows the promising potential of CBMPs as an adjunctive treatment option in the management of TRE [treatment-resistant epilepsy.]”
In 2018, regulators at the US Food and Drug Administration granted market approval to Epidiolex, a prescription medicine containing a standardized formulation of plant-derived cannabidiol (CBD) for the treatment of two rare forms of epilepsy: Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome.
Other observational studies assessing the use of cannabis products among those enrolled in the UK Medical Cannabis Registry have reported them to be effective for patients diagnosed with cancer-related pain, anxiety, fibromyalgia, inflammatory bowel disease, hypermobility disorders, depression, migraine, multiple sclerosis, osteoarthritis, and inflammatory arthritis, among other conditions.
Full text of the study, “UK Medical Cannabis Registry: A clinical outcomes analysis for epilepsy,” appears in Brain and Behavior. Additional information on cannabis and epilepsy is available from NORML’s publication, Clinical Applications for Cannabis & Cannabinoids.
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