A new study reveals that people who smoke marijuana are at three times higher risk of dying from high blood pressure than those who have never used the drug.
Published on Wednesday in the European Journal of Preventative Cardiology, the study drew its findings from an analysis of about 1,200 people. The study's co-lead author, Barbara Yankey said, "Support for liberal marijuana use is partly due to claims that it is beneficial and possibly not harmful to health."
"It is important to establish whether any health benefits outweigh the potential health, social and economic risks," she continued. "If marijuana use is implicated in cardiovascular diseases and deaths, then it rests on the health community and policy makers to protect the public."
This particular study was actually a follow-up of 1,213 people aged 20 and up, who have been in a massive and ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The survey began between the years of 2005 and 2006, when researchers asked the subjects whether or not they had ever used marijuana.
Yankey's work on this study collected information on marijuana use and compared it with mortality data in 2011 from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, and adjusted for confounding factors such as tobacco smoking and variables including sex, age, and ethnicity.
Researchers found that the average length of use among marijuana users was 11.5 years. The results of the study showed that regular pot smokers had a 3.42x risk of hypertension death than non-users. For each additional year of use, subjects increased their risk of high blood pressure by 1.04 times.
The study found no evidence of a link between marijuana use and death from heart problems or cerebrovascular diseases, like strokes. The study was also limited by the researchers' inability to accurately know whether the subjects had used the drug continuously since first trying it.
Other experts say they support the claims by the study's authors that smoking weed might have more medical consequences than many once thought. Ian Hamilton, a lecturer in mental health at Britain's York University said, "Despite the widely held view that cannabis is benign, this research adds to previous work suggesting otherwise."
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