Johns Hopkins Launches $10M Fed-Funded Study Of 10,000 Medical Marijuana Patients: What We Can Expect

A Johns Hopkins University study will track 10,000 medical marijuana patients for a year to analyze cannabis therapy's effectiveness and impact, while collecting data on dosage, methods, product composition, drug interactions and treatment details.

As part of a larger Cannabis and Health Research Initiative, the data will be combined with existing observational studies and a system for identifying medicinal cannabis users in electronic medical records, in order to compare their information with non-users. Researchers also plan to create a library of publications and other education materials.

“We have the availability of cannabis as a therapeutic, but we’re lacking the quality of data that we have with other medicines,” Ryan Vandrey said in the university's newsletter, Hopkins Brain Wise. Vandrey is one of the initiative’s creators and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

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“Our mission with this research is to understand the health impacts of therapeutic cannabis use,” Vandrey said. “We hope to provide some starting points for understanding what types of products may or may not be helpful and what types of products may be more risky for use in certain populations or for certain therapeutic purposes.”

Vandrey will collaborate with Johannes Thrul, associate professor of mental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and others on the project, including Colorado-based nonprofit Realm of Caring.

Funded by a $10-million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), researchers plan to collect data from volunteers as they progress from the beginning of their cannabis experience through a year or more of medical marijuana use, explained Thrul. 

“We’re tracking them with multiple assessments over the course of their first year with more tightly spaced assessments toward the beginning because our assumption is that as people are starting their medical cannabis journey, they’re likely going to try different products until they find the products that best help them with their symptoms,” Thrul said.

In addition to supporting clinical decision-making, policies and regulatory structures for medical marijuana use, the registry could provide information for developing clinical trials and basic science research.

“Under the umbrella term of cannabis exist hundreds of products that are all different in very important and significant ways,” Vandrey noted. “We’re trying to narrow the scope a little bit, find areas of real promise and focus the science on those.”

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