CBD, Cannabis And Psychosis Video Transcript
In this episode I’m gonna be tackling CBD, cannabis and psychosis I’m gonna be kind of untangling a lot of the confusion around cannabis and psychosis telling you what we actually know for sure and how I’ve used it in patients who may be at risk with sub psychosis and what to actually avoid so the relationship between cannabis in general usually high THC cannabis in psychosis is a really complex one and the research we have coming out so far has been done in actually recreational smoked cannabis that is very high THC so the stuff that gets you really high and very low CBD so the stuff that’s potentially mood balancing so this is the first problem with the research we have is it’s not an accurate picture of how we use medical cannabis how I would use it as a medicine and it doesn’t tell us anything about CBD so the first thing that I usually tell patients who may be a risk of psychosis or of mania or bipolar is that they should really avoid THC because THC in some vulnerable people and again this is just a very small proportion of people who would use THC even high doses of THC may make them more likely to tip over into a psychotic episode or into a bipolar manic episode again it’s still a very low risk but it’s a potential risk if they’re genetically predisposed and if they have other risk factors like a family history for example or they’ve had an episode of mania in the past or they’ve had an episode of psychosis in the past so in general I just tell those people really to avoid THC on the other hand we have CBD CBD has actually been shown in multiple studies to have an T psychosis properties so that means it might help imbalance mood in people who may be treated disposed to psychosis and people who actually already have schizophrenia and psychosis and manic episodes it may actually help them be used as a treatment for their episodes and potentially as a longer-term treatment in schizophrenia there was one side of that paired one of the main drugs used in schizophrenia one of the anti-psychotic drugs to CBD and actually both were shown to have an antipsychotic effect on the brain areas involved in schizophrenia psychosis but CBD actually had a much better scientific profile than some of those other medications so right now we don’t know enough to say that CBD alone can be used as a treatment for schizophrenia but certainly has a lot of promise in that area so if someone has a history of psychosis or bipolar Armenia I usually still tell them it’s probably pretty safe for them to use CBD and it may actually even help their condition so the safest form of CBD for someone who has a genetic predisposition to use would be CBD from hemp in a combination that has less than 0.2 or 0.3 percent THC so a really really good quality CBD oil made to from suitable grade standards made it’s a medicine but really really low in THC even oils CBD oils that are produced for the medical market in Canada for example sometimes that I have up to one percent of of THC and really really high CBD are probably still pretty safe but again the lower this the THC content probably the better in the safer to make matters more complicated there was actually a really interesting study that looked at people who are already diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder so bipolar one with manic episodes and then they look to see who smoked cannabis so this is against smoking recreational high THC cannabis and who didn’t and what they actually found was really interesting when they put these people into a brain scanner and functional MRI machine they found that the people who smoked cannabis even the high THC cannabis and again these are people with already have schizophrenia and bipolar they actually had less grey matter less brain gray matter loss than the people who didn’t smoke cannabis so that’s a really interesting finding and we don’t know what this means does that mean that THC sometimes as someone who already had schizophrenia isn’t as bad as we thought the question is remains and we just don’t have the answer yet so in general I still think because it’s a big question mark generally avoiding definitely all smoked cannabis which we never use medically and avoiding hc’ in general is the safest option for now okay so getting off to CBD what’s the evidence there well there was actually a really interesting study in an RCT or randomized controlled trial which means that’s a really high-quality study with respect to like conventional evidence base and it actually looked at the effect of CBD of cannabidiol on people’s brains that already had been diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis and they actually showed that after giving them a single dose of CBD the brain areas involved in psychosis were normalized these involve some of the midbrain straddle areas of the brain and it’s really interesting to see that a single dose a single large dose of CBD had that reversal of some of those that some of those effects in the brain that we see with psychosis so again this is pretty strong evidence that it has an antipsychotic effect in the brain and there’s many other research studies that are starting to support the same thing so getting back to what is the actual evidence we have for CBD and psychosis well there was a really interesting study done in 2018 done in people at high high risk clinical risk of psychosis so these are patients that normally you wouldn’t want to give any THC to so they gave them a single high dose of CBD and then they scan their brains and saw what happened and what they found was the brain areas that are involved in psychosis and are lit up in people who have schizophrenia they dampened down and normalized after the single dose of CBD so this is pretty strong evidence for an anti-psychotic affective CBD in the brains of people who are at really high risk of developing those problems so again we don’t have the full picture yet but this is pretty promising another really interesting study is where they took healthy people so people who didn’t have any psychosis in their history and they gave them a dose of CBD and then they gave them a high dose of THC to see if the CBD given beforehand which basically dampened down and prevent the pro psychotic chi high high THC effects in the brain and what they found as it actually worked so again it appears that see is protective in the brain and it may even help with THC induced psychosis so we think that a lot of the earlier research about cannabis predisposing people who are predisposed anyways to psychosis it’s probably largely because of the fact that they were smoking high high high THC and very very low CBD street cannabis so in summary CBD is anti-psychotic it seems and THC may be problematic in people at high risk for psychosis so best to avoid it so if you liked this video please like it leave a comment or share it with someone who may be interested in CBD and medical cannabis and if you want more on CBD medical cannabis and 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