A new study of nearly 160,000 people has found that those who smoke marijuana at least once a month have an elevated risk of heart attack.
The study, published Friday in the journal Cell, looked at three groups of people to determine whether or not those who smoke weed are raising their risk of heart attack.
The first group was composed of more than 11,000 people aged 40 to 69 who reported smoking at least once a month. Researchers compared the first group to 122,000 other people in the same age range who reported they did not smoke and a third group of 23,000 who smoked less frequently.
The participants of the study were then controlled for three factors that often play a part in the risk for heart disease, age, body mass index, and gender.
The study found that those who smoked marijuana frequently had a higher risk than those who did not of having a heart attack before they turned 50. The study added that one heart attack would increase the risk of having more and developing heart failure.
Joseph Wu, the senior author of the study, is the director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and shared that this research works to clear up what he thinks is a 'misperception' of weed, NBC News reported.
"The public has this perception — in my opinion, misperception — that marijuana is completely safe, and it's healthy for you. But in reality, this study shows a high dose of THC, the main component of marijuana, causes vascular inflammation," Wu said to NBC News.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention released a study in 2021 that linked heart attacks to marijuana use in young adults. Both studies came to the same conclusion that smoking weed brings a risk of heart disease.
However, the study in Cell went further than the CDC's, looking to answer why smoking marijuana can develop heart problems.
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Scientists studied how THC affects human stem cells and mice stem cells and found that THC not only binds to a receptor in the brain, which gives the high feeling, but also to a receptor in blood vessels.
This leads researchers to believe that using THC frequently could be what causes the receptor to activate inflammation in blood vessels. It's believed that it then could accelerate a buildup of plaque in arteries, which causes heart attacks.
However, Wu said that the research wasn't only on people, so most of the results only create a reason for more research instead of a direct causality for human health.
Wu said that human studies could offer more insight into whether THC is directly related to heart disease or not.
Marijuana cigarettes have become more potent as levels of THC in them have become higher recently, and Wu says it's because of the legalization of cannabis.
"In the old days, one joint was like 5 percent THC," Wu said to NBC News. "Right now, some of the suppliers are providing one joint that has 85 percent THC."
Still, there is the possibility that weed has health benefits, with early research showing that CBD has anti-inflammatory properties to help with chronic pain.
Overall, Wu said that more studies need to be done in order to find out whether or not marijuana is causing more harm than good.
"We would have [to] do additional studies to show that CBD has anti-inflammatory effects," Wu said to NBC News. "But the THC here, we don't think it's anti-inflammatory. We think it's pro-inflammatory."
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