Kevin Smith says smoking weed pre-heart attack saved his life. Can marijuana prevent heart attacks? Here's what the science says.
Kevin Smith says smoking weed pre-heart attack saved his life.
Writer and director Kevin Smith survived a "widowmaker"
heart attack earlier this year — a heart attack that kills 80 percent of
people who have one.
How did Smith manage to survive? Weed.
"They got me to the hospital and they wheel me into the
emergency room and the whole time I’m chill. Like, the guy said, the
paramedic, he goes, 'You’re being real calm, that’s going to get you
through this,'" Smith told Stephen Colbert on May 1.
"And there’s a dude behind him [that] goes, 'That’s what’s going to save his life.' And I’m like, 'What does that part [mean]?'"
Smith was initially worried that all the weed he smoked
earlier in the day was the cause of his heart attack, but his doctor
said otherwise.
"He said, 'no, quite the opposite. That weed saved your life,'" Smith said.
Can marijuana prevent a heart attack?
Don’t go investing all of your health care dollars in marijuana just yet.
A 2002 study from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston found that smoking weed increases a person’s chances of having a heart attack within the first hour of smoking — more than five times that of non-smokers.
The reason: Smoking weed "increases the heart rate by about
40 beats per minute," lead study author, Dr. Murray Mittleman, director
of cardiovascular epidemiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
said at the time.
"It also causes the blood pressure to increase when the
person is lying down, and then abruptly fall when the person stands up,
often causing dizziness," he added. "These effects may pose significant
risk, especially in people with unrecognized coronary disease."
Mittleman added that the role THC — the chemical compound in marijuana that causes the high — plays in the risk is unknown.
What current research says about marijuana and heart attacks
The Harvard and Beth Israel study was conducted over 16
years ago — a lifetime when it comes to medical research. Is the link
between weed and heart attacks still relevant?
For the study, cardiologist Dr. Aditi Kalla and team
analyzed over 20 million medical records from people between 18 and 55
who had been discharged from hospitals in the United States. The team
broke the data down to people who admitted to smoking weed before their
hospital visit (1.5 percent of patients) and found that these patients
were at 26 percent higher risk for stroke and 10 percent higher risk for
heart failure than those who didn’t smoke weed.
"Even when we corrected for known risk factors, we still
found a higher rate of both stroke and heart failure in these patients,
so that leads us to believe that there is something else going on
besides just obesity or diet-related cardiovascular side effects," Kalla
said in a press release at the time.
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Can anything related to marijuana help your heart?
As Harvard pointed out,
marijuana is still considered a Schedule I substance, meaning the
federal government views it as having "no currently accepted medical use
and a high potential for abuse," making it difficult for in-depth
research on its health effects.
That said, research into a derivative from the cannabis plant shows promise when it comes tohealth.
A 2013 review
published in the British Journal of Pharmacology found that cannabidiol
(CBD) helped reduce vascular tension in rodents, along cardiomyopathy
associated with diabetes.
CBD — found in the seeds, stalks and flowers of cannabis
plants — is also shown to have benefits to people with diseases like
cancer, colitis and Huntington’s disease.
Kevin Smith’s health now
"This is the weight I was when I met my wife, so this is a
good weight to be at. Last time I was at this weight, I scored, big
time," he said.
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