Does marijuana weaken heart muscles?

Title should be changed to reflect that only a correlation has been found, not a causation. Or just change the title of the post to match the actual article title instead of editorializing it.

Here: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-11/aha-mum11031...

The study was previewed at a poster session at the AHA's annual conference this week. The full paper will be released shortly.

Doctors looked at 33,000 people who were hospitalized with stress cardiomyopathy (sudden rapid weakening of heart muscle without the typical MI markers) and found that 210 were activate marijuana users (via interviews or drug tests). Compared to non-users, marijuana users were found to be younger and less likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, or other cardiac risk factors.

Even without these risk factors, marijuana users were 3x as likely to go into cardiac arrest and were 4x as likely to require an implanted defibrillator.

There were a number of confounding variables such as marijuana users being twice as likely to have a history of depression, 3x as likely to have a history of psychosis, 75% more likely to have a history of anxiety disorder, and much more likely to use tobacco, alcohol, or multiple drugs. These were all adjusted for and the heart problems still remained.

Yes, it's a retrospective study without the ability to draw correlations, but it's definitely concerning and definitely worth following up with further research.

From my own speculation, stress cardiomyopathy (aka broken heart syndrome, where a serious emotional trauma can cause literal heart damage) is thought to be linked to catecholamine-linked muscular dysfunction. There are some older studies that have shown left-ventricle performance loss and norepi increases for several hours after smoking marijuana, so it seems like the cardiomyopathy could just be the chronic result of repeated exposure.

Mmmhmmm

Everything in moderation.