Cannabis drugs can make pain tolerable, finds study

Researchers have determined that cannabinoid drugs may make pain feel less unpleasant and more tolerable.

A team of researchers from the College of Arts and Science studied the effects on cannabis on pain and came to the conclusion that though cannabinoid drugs do not reduce the intensity of pain, they may have the ability to make it tolerable and less unpleasant.

Martin De Vita G'17, a doctoral candidate in the clinical psychology programme, the lead author said in the study, "Cannabinoid drugs are widely used as analgesics [painkillers], but experimental pain studies have produced mixed findings. Pain is a complex phenomenon with multiple dimensions that can be affected separately."

For the study, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, De Vita and his co-authors firstly identified more than 1,830 experimental studies on cannabis that had been conducted in North America and Europe over a period of 40 years. They then chose 18 studies from and out together data from 440 participants.

The team found that cannabinoid drugs were related to modest increase in the threshold and tolerance of pain. They noted that there was no reduction in the intensity of ongoing experimental pain, but a reduced unpleasantness of painful stimuli.

"What this means is that cannabinoid analgesia may be driven by an affective, rather than a sensory component. These findings have implications for understanding the analgesic properties of cannabinoids," De Vita said in the paper.

The experiment was limited to laboratory induced pain, but the result gave hope to the team to research on clinical and neuropathic pain and see the difference. While clinical pain is progressive and non-malignant, neuropathic pain happens due to a disease or damage to the nervous system, which results in tissue injury.

"The cumulative research synthesised in our review has helped characterise how cannabis and cannabinoids affect different dimensions of pain reactivity. It may underlie the widely held belief that cannabis relieves pain. For now, we still have much to learn," concluded De Vita.