Migraines and cannabis - a review study

Published in Frontiers in Neurology in May 2022, this study summarizes previously published research on the effectiveness of medical cannabis on migraine headaches and associated symptoms.

The review included 12 publications involving almost 2,000 patients. An important part of their conclusion was that these effective treatments continued for 30 to 180 days of use. The long-term effectiveness improved over time with regular use.

The overall results are very positive, despite the authors' wish for higher quality studies. If the FDA would allow researchers to study it the way they study other important drugs, we would quickly see more high quality research.

The authors provided the following summary of their analysis:

• Medical cannabis significantly reduced nausea and vomiting associated with migraine attacks after 6 months of use.
• Also, MC reduced the number of days of migraine after 30 days, and the frequency of migraine headaches per month.
• MC reduced migraine headaches per month from 10.4 to 4.6 at follow-up.
• Medical cannabis aborted migraines in 11.6% of users.
• Like amitriptyline, medical cannabis use resulted in reduced migraine frequency (~40%).

The full text article is here at the NIH PubMed Central.