Harvard Study: CBD May Significantly Reduce Anxiety with Minimal Side Effects | Hacker News Reader

Harvard Study: CBD May Significantly Reduce Anxiety with Minimal Side Effects

themarijuanaherald.com

35 pointsDemiGuru42 comments

> Methods: For the open-label stage of clinical trial NCT02548559, autoregressive linear modeling assessed efficacy and tolerability of four-weeks of 1 mL t.i.d. treatment with a full-spectrum, high-CBD sublingual solution (9.97 mg/mL CBD, 0.23 mg/mL Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) in 14 outpatients with moderate-to-severe anxiety, defined as ≥16 on the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) or ≥11 on the Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale (OASIS).

Sorry, but mental health studies without a placebo control group are useless.

It's well known that placebo groups have a very strong response in these studies. Unless you have a control group, you have no idea if the effects are due to the active drug or due to involvement in the study.

Also, it doesn't make sense for them to use a THC-inclusive blend and then attribute the effects entirely to CBD. The amount of THC consumed by patients per day was about 0.7mg sublingually. That's not enough to get people "high" but it is enough to be relevant for the drug's effects.

This is not a good study. I'm surprised to see this attached to Harvard.

Is there no recourse at Harvard for publishing terrible studies? People pretend the elite colleges are better but it seems to not be the case

Lets be clear here: CBD is not a CB1 or CB2 agonist (or antagonist, or anything else). It is active at the serotonin-1a autoreceptor (like buspirone) as a partial agonist and then only at dosages that are infeasibly expensive at current market pricing. An adult human typically requires multiple 0.3 to 0.6 gram (that's 600 milligram) doses per day to reach a physiologically active level.

Dosing and pricing it like THC is simply placebo. It is not THC. This study is based off obviously false premises.

At $2 or less per gram it would be much cheaper than plenty of pharma products. https://www.crescentcanna.com/product/cbd-isolate-powder/

It's good to see this. Just a handful of years ago it was priced the same as THC so a gram would be hundreds of dollars.

Thank you for sharing this. I’ve been looking for useful dosing data for years and haven’t found any.

Do you have any references for the dosing data that you’ve mentioned?

I can't find the ones I'm remembering (where the researchers actually complained about price) but basically just look at any human study of CBD re: anxiety in a reputable scientific journal and 300-600mg is the baseline. ie, https://www.nature.com/articles/npp20116 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026988111037928...

Can you provide a rough estimate of how much it would cost for one dose?

Interesting, my wife bought some 'strong' cdb oil caps and I ended up taking them - I certainly felt like I could feel them after taking one or two. Would be interested if it was all placebo as I found the effect (esp alongside 5htp) very pleasant and gave me excellent sleep.

> Lets be clear here: CBD is not a CB1 or CB2 agonist (or antagonist, or anything else).

CBD does act on CB1 and CB2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2219532/

It also binds to a number of other receptors throughout the brain, but I don't think it's accurate to reduce its effects to a singular 5-HT1A receptor. It especially doesn't match the clinical effects, as Buspirone requires weeks to show effects while high doses of CBD are active within hours.

But you're very right that the CBD dose in this study is far lower than other studies. Typical study doses are 300mg of CBD or more.

> Dosing and pricing it like THC is simply placebo. It is not THC.

The study was of a mixed CBD/THC mixture. The patients were actually receiving a total of 0.7mg of THC per day. Not enough for overt effects, but enough to do something (and also fail any drug tests they might take).

The real flaw in this study is the lack of placebo group. You can't run a real psychiatric medication study without a control group and expect useful results.

I appreciate the input, but did you look at the Ki binding figures for CBD in the paper you linked? ~4000 nanomolar antagonist is not nanomolar unless you're really stretching it. It is so high that there are innumberable unrelated compounds with the same very low affinity. It is true it does act as an atagonist, but it is a vacuous truth applicable to so many things that you wouldn't call CB1 or CB2 antagonist.

>Lets be clear here: CBD is not a CB1 or CB2 agonist (or antagonist, or anything else).

I mean.. citation needed. That's the generally recognized MoA.

We give CBD oil to our elderly dog. About 15mg, 2x/day. Dog is ~60lbs.

There may be other (non-THC) cannabinoids/etc involved -- product ingredients are "Broad Spectrum CBD, Hemp Seed Oil", and is sold online as "CBD Oil".

Dogs are not humans of course. I have not tested this product on myself. But I've clearly and immediately observed positive physiological effects after my dog has ingested this product.

These are not laboratory conditions, but our tests were at least moderately-controlled and double-blind. After a couple weeks of varying dosages (including down to zero), we felt further experiments would be unnecessary and unkind.

She has been in good shape ever since, with zero relapses into previous conditions, which were obvious and chronic. We have increased the dosage twice in the intervening ~3 years, when she was starting to show the smallest echo of the old condition. Each increase has had a clear, positive, and immediate (<1 day) effect.

I have no dog in this fight. Well...I have no stake in this discussion of any other sort.

I know how "miracle drug" this sounds, and I apologize if it strains credulity. YMMV. I'm deeply grateful for the impact CBD oil has had on my dog. I hope other dogs are equally fortunate. People too, if it works for them.

Link to the actual study page on nih. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36352103/

Relveant summary:

"Cannabidiol (CBD) is a compound found within the Cannabis sativa plant. Previous studies suggest CBD may reduce anxiety. In this clinical trial, 14 patients with anxiety were treated for four-weeks with a cannabis-derived study product with high levels of CBD, administered under their tongue 3 times each day. All patients knew that they were being given CBD. Following four weeks of treatment, patients reported reduced anxiety as well as improvements in mood, sleep, quality of life, and measures reflecting their self-control and ability to think flexibly. Patients did not experience any serious negative effects during the trial. The impact of this product is now being evaluated in more patients with anxiety."

14 people, and it wasn't blind? That's pretty poor quality.

No control group, and the only results are self-reported. Someone ought to establish some kind of trustworthiness rating system that penalizes institutions and researchers for publishing this kind of trash.

I was going to also criticize the journalist but they actually included the abstract and links to the actual study which is above and beyond what most do. It doesn't excuse publishing headlines like this though.

hARvaRd sTuDY

Not debating your other concerns but for mental health isn't self reporting really the only option?

No, interviews are the standard, which is not the same as a self-reporting questionnaire.

I’d call it absolutely useless.

It's really hard to trust anything about weed as a medicine because almost all of it is extremely biased by either strong interests to commercialize weed, or standard pharma companies trying to prevent anyone from coming between them and their opiod users. Interested academics simply haven't been allowed to do actual studies.

Sorry to hijack the thread, CBD has been studied as potential adjuvant for cancer (here's one lab that did multiple studies https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=McAllister+SD&cauthor_...) allegedly due to inhibition of some genes that caused metastasis.

Yet some scientists have data on negative effects on chemotherapy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hG6lvLB0kQ

At best it would mean, antitumoral benefits can be gained before and after chemo, but I'm not sure. If anybody is knowledgeable on this topic, hit me up.

I tried CBD a few times for my Essential Tremor, since it was a recommended form of home treatment. Didn't help that at all and I can't recall feeling any calmer about anything while using it. I've also given CBD treats to my dog and his behavior usually doesn't change.

Really makes me wonder if CBD by itself is just a placebo thing or only really helps a small subset of people.

How much CBD were you taking?

A lot of these studies gave their test subjects CBD in dosages of several hundred miligrams at once. In oil form that's often entire bottles ($30-50 per legal product in my jurisdiction). So it's basically financially infeasible for anyone to self-medicate with CBD unless they get it from prescriptions for an actual medically diagnosed condition.

I've tried taking a bottle of CBD oil, which is only a few euros here from the drug store. The main issue is it makes you high in some way, so definitely not without side effects. No idea how they work around that.

> 14 outpatients....

How is "increased energy" a side effect?

How is it not a side effect? Side effects don't have to be negative.

By not being the primary effect, it has no choice but to be a side effect

drinking water does significantly reduce anxiety and has no side effects

citation?

there are tons, but here's one:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Voluntary-Dehydration-...

many people are actually not drinking enough water.

I thought this was pretty well-known already, but good to see it being studied. Pure CBD is probably one of the most effective anti-anxiety compounds out there, with zero effects other than "less anxious".

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