Meh, I'm not advocating that everyone start smoking weed to avoid a stroke, but seems to me that the associated reduction in blood pressure (unless you're prone to anxiety attacks anyway and maybe even more so then) would
trump any other factors. Heh... except I'm not allowed to use that word or else, raises peoples' blood pressure lol.
Anyway, I skimmed over the linked article and a couple of things stand out. I did not read it carefully, not that important to me.
1) Young adults that smoke pot, likely have other risky behaviors. I don't mean to start arguments with pot smokers, but on average, yeah that is sadly the case for the youth engaging in it. For example stimulant use and poor diet.
2) Non-stimulant, psychoactive drug testing done on rats, or other lower animals is the worst kind of way to test for something like inducing a stroke, because their pea brains can't process causation, what is happening to them, while humans SEEK what is happening to them.
Big difference. If I smoked a joint to get high, I expect that. If I'm just minding my own business, never ingested THC in my life, and WHAM I'm stoned out of my mind (like if someone spiked a brownie) without ever experiencing that before, yeah it's going to be a massive blood pressure raising event.
They needed some controls. Set up a group of mice, who ate a little THC with some food treat, so they associated the buzz with pleasure. Get them used to it, and THEN run the comparison experiment.
Even then, it doesn't seem quite right to compare for something related to blood pressure, because it's a completely different scenario, being a rat in a lab being experimented on, compared to humans. In worst case. humans subject to addictive habits, will use the intoxication as a coping mechanism where there was an expectation of an escapism stress reduction, while with the rats, all they can really process is that what little of their instincts that they have that are relevant to survival of this science experiment, are now compromised.
That's about as far as I can project myself into the mind of a stoned rat. Because not stoned.
Dysfunction and oxidative stress? I think it is fair to state that any psychoactive substance would cause an increase, IF all else where equal. At the same time, all else isn't equal and it, as well as any other study that properly isolates a factor, unfortunately can't also de-isolate the relevance of that factor.
I'm suggesting that human THC consumption, has far less relevance to strokes than most other factors. like, if you wanted to, you could probably find a correlation to # of potholes on your local roads and tie that to strokes too.
Unsubscribed, I don't have sufficient interest in the topic to waste time arguing. Take that however you will.
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