Hypermobility Disorder Patients Report Improvements Following Cannabis Use
Hypermobility disorders are serious health conditions involving excessive joint flexibility and instability. Examples include hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) and hypermobility spectrum disorders (HSD). The conditions often involve the patient suffering from pain, injuries, and other symptoms.
According to researchers affiliated with the University of Edinburgh, “General Joint Hypermobility is a common condition found in 2–57% of the population.” For Ehlers-Danlos syndrome specifically, the rate is about 1 in 5000 people.
A separate team of researchers based in the United Kingdom recently conducted a study examining patients diagnosed with hypermobility disorders and their use of medical cannabis therapies. Below is more information about the research and its results via a news release from NORML:
London, United Kingdom: Patients suffering from hypermobility disorders report sustained symptomatic improvements following their use of cannabis-based medicinal products (CBMPs), according to observational data published in the journal of the American College of Rheumatology, ACR Open Rheumatology.
British researchers assessed the use of botanical cannabis or oil extracts in 161 patients with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or similar hypermobility disorders enrolled in the UK Medical Cannabis Registry. (British specialists may prescribe cannabis-based medicinal products to patients unresponsive to conventional medications.) Researchers assessed changes from baseline in patient-reported outcomes at one, three, six, 12, and 18 months.
Patients reported sustained improvements in pain-specific metrics, as well as improvements in sleep and anxiety following cannabis therapy. The most reported adverse effects associated with cannabis treatment were headache and lethargy.
“This case series found improvements in perceived pain severity and interference, general HRQoL [health-related quality of life], sleep quality, and anxiety in patients with HSD [hypermobility spectrum disorder] or hEDS [hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome] after CBMP prescription,” the study’s authors concluded. “At 18 months, between 18.01 percent and 25.47 percent of individuals reported a clinically significant improvement in their pain depending on the assessment measure used. … [T]hese findings may help guide current clinical practice and shared decision‐making between patients and physicians.”
Other observational studies assessing the use of cannabis products among patients enrolled in the UK Cannabis Registry have reported them to be effective for those diagnosed with cancer-related pain, anxiety, fibromyalgia, inflammatory bowel disease, post-traumatic stress, depression, migraine, multiple sclerosis, osteoarthritis, and inflammatory arthritis, among other conditions.
Full text of the study, “UK Medical Cannabis registry: An analysis of outcomes of medical cannabis therapy for hypermobility-associated chronic pain,” appears in ACR Open Rheumatology.
