Education

Mechanistic insights into cannabinoid signaling could improve therapeutic applications.

Cannabidiol (CBD) is a highly touted product for many different disorders among the lay press. Numerous CBD products are available, ranging from a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved product called Epidiolex to products created for medical marijuana dispensaries and products sold in smoke shops, convenience stores, and over the Internet.

Cannabinoids have a long record of recreational and medical use and become increasingly approved for pain therapy. This development is based on preclinical and human experimental research summarized in this review.

Radicle Science and Open Book Extracts release results of the largest ever blinded, randomized clinical trial on cannabinoids and pain—and the first study of its kind to examine the impact of rare cannabinoids.

CBD’s potential to reduce cue-induced craving and anxiety provides a strong basis for further investigation of this phytocannabinoid as a treatment option for opioid use disorder.

Significant changes have taken place in the policy landscape surrounding cannabis legalization, production, and use. During the past 20 years, 25 states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis and/or cannabidiol (a component of cannabis) for medical conditions or retail sales at the state level and 4 states have legalized both the medical and recreational use of cannabis. These landmark changes in policy have impacted cannabis use patterns and perceived levels of risk. In the current report, the committee presents a rigorous and thoughtful summary of the landscape of cannabis and health and puts forth recommendations to help advance the research field and better inform public health decisions.

The recent trend for legalization of medicinal cannabis and cannabinoid-containing products, together with their soporific effects, has led to a surge of interest of their potential therapeutic role in the management of some common sleep disorders, such as insomnia, sleep disordered breathing, and restless legs syndrome, and less common disorders such as narcolepsy and parasomnias. This review summarizes the mechanism, role, and current body of literature on cannabinoids in various sleep disorders.

This study has demonstrated that ZTL-101, a novel cannabinoid therapy, is well tolerated and improves insomnia symptoms and sleep quality in individuals with chronic insomnia symptoms. These improvements, observed over a 2-week dosing period, are encouraging and support further investigation of ZTL-101 for the treatment of insomnia in studies with larger sample sizes.

The conceptual transition from focusing on sleep duration and sleep disorders to the positive notion of sleep health provides a more holistic health-oriented perspective on sleep. Furthermore, we contend that sleep health is a public health opportunity that has been under-recognized by both the sleep research and public health communities until recently. Indeed, the current state of the science indicates that the benefits of sleep health to the population affect a wide range of critical health outcomes.

Insomnia is one of the common but neglected conditions seen in family practice with long term and serious effects on health of a patient. Family physicians have the responsibility of diagnosing and adequately treating this. This study was done to find the prevalence of chronic insomnia in adult patients visiting a family medicine outpatient department (OPD) in a hospital and to assess the risk factors and co morbidities associated with it.

The extent to which sleep is causally related to mental health is unclear. One way to test the causal link is to evaluate the extent to which interventions that improve sleep quality also improve mental health. We conducted a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials that reported the effects of an intervention that improved sleep on composite mental health, as well as on seven specific mental health difficulties.