Medicinal cannabis left liver enzymes undisturbed in cancer patients
Scarborough L, Hardy J, Gurgenci T, Huggett G, Pelecanos A
Medicinal Plants
Cannabis sativa is one of humanity's oldest cultivated plants, and understanding its safety profile at therapeutic doses strengthens the case for responsible medicinal use of a crop many gardeners and herbalists already grow or study.
Researchers followed hundreds of cancer patients who were taking cannabis medicines and checked their liver health along the way. After four weeks, the liver markers they tracked stayed normal for everyone, no matter which form of cannabis they took. This means short-term use of these cannabis products, at the doses tested, doesn't appear to stress the liver.
Key Findings
No patients in the cannabis groups exceeded the liver enzyme thresholds of 3x upper limit of normal (or 5x for those with liver metastases) for ALT or AST.
CBD doses up to 600 mg/day showed no clinically meaningful liver enzyme elevation over 28 days.
CBD-only and THC/CBD combination products produced no significant differences in liver enzyme levels.
chevron_right Technical Summary
A clinical study of 287 advanced cancer patients found that medicinal cannabis, whether CBD alone or combined with THC, did not meaningfully raise liver enzyme levels over four weeks, even at doses up to 600 mg CBD per day.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Liver enzyme effects of medicinal cannabis in advanced cancer: a substudy of two randomised trials.
This substudy investigated whether medicinal cannabis causes an elevation in alanine aminotransferase (ALT) or aspartate aminotransferase (AST) in patients with advanced malignancy and determined w...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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