Patients with terminal illnesses are given palliative care to enhance their quality of life. In the context of palliative care, medicinal cannabis (MC) has been utilized to treat a variety of symptoms in patients. For a study, researchers sought to assess the breadth of the body of research on the effects and possible risks of MC on symptom control and quality of life in palliative care.
The Cochrane Library, Clinicaltrials.gov, Embase, and PubMed were all searched for relevant publications published between 1960 and September 9, 2021. According to the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluations, the quality of the evidence was evaluated. In addition, the RoB 2 tool and the Risk of Bias in Non-randomized Studies—of Interventions (ROBINS-I) tool were used to evaluate the risk of bias in both randomized controlled trials and non-randomized studies, respectively.
There were 4,786 individuals in 52 trials (20 randomized; 32 non-randomized), of whom 4,491 had cancer, 43 had dementia, 235 had AIDS, 16 had spasticity, and 1 had NORSE syndrome. All studies had “very low” or “poor” evidence quality, and only 2 randomized controlled trials had low evidence quality. In patients with cancer, some MC products showed positive treatment effects (statistical significance with P< 0.05) for pain, nausea and vomiting, appetite, sleep, fatigue, chemosensory perception, and paraneoplastic night sweats; in patients with dementia, for appetite and agitation; and in patients with AIDS, for appetite, nausea, and vomiting. Due to the variety of cannabis products utilized and the heterogeneity of the research results, a meta-analysis could not be done.
While several MC products in the palliative care context have been shown to have favorable therapeutic benefits, further high-quality data was required to support recommendations for their usage in clinical practice.
Reference: jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(22)00760-6/fulltext
