Two recent studies have challenged the idea that cannabis helps to improve sleep.
For one study, researchers reviewed data from nine trials involving 537 adults with insomnia who were randomly assigned to treatment with medical cannabis, a placebo or an antidepressant.
Medical cannabis showed little to no clinically meaningful improvement in sleep quality and satisfaction, total sleep time, or daytime functioning compared with placebo or the antidepressant, the researchers reported on Tuesday in The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
However, the various trials used different cannabis products, none of them followed participants for more than 12 weeks, and the overall quality and certainty of the evidence were rated very low to low because of possible bias and other limitations, the researchers noted.
Therefore, the findings cannot reliably answer whether medical cannabis helps people with insomnia, they said.
“Rather than viewing the findings as either an endorsement or a rejection of medical cannabis, clinicians and patients should recognize the uncertainty and consider individual circumstances while better evidence is generated,” study leader Dr. Luis Garegnani from Universidad Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, Argentina, said in a statement.
A separate study that followed 1,266 participants from young adulthood into middle age found long-term cannabis use was linked to lower sleep quality as measured by wrist-worn monitors.
The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, opens new tab, also suggested that cannabis-related sleep disruptions may go unnoticed by users themselves.
“The wearable device detected more nighttime disruption among participants with long-term cannabis exposure, but the participants themselves generally did not report worse sleep,” study leader Dr. Thanh-Huyen T. Vu of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine said in a statement.
“This study challenges the common belief that cannabis helps people sleep better,” she added. “Our findings suggest cannabis may actually be associated with poorer sleep quality, even if people don’t perceive those changes.”