A cannabis compound may help reduce psychotic symptoms in patients with schizophrenia over and above the benefits derived from treatment with antipsychotic medications, new research suggests.
Results from the first randomized trial of cannabidiol as an adjunctive therapy in schizophrenia showed that compared with placebo, the compound significantly improved positive symptoms and symptom severity.
Cannabidiol, which was administered along with antipsychotic medication, was also associated with nonsignificant improvements in negative and overall symptoms, as well as functional and cognitive scores. Patients taking the drug were also nonsignificantly twice as likely to have a response as participants receiving placebo.
The findings were presented here at the Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS) 2016 Biennial Meeting.
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I am disappointed. I thought we would be able to take CBD without antipsychotics. Antipsychotics have all sorts of side effects we need to replace them with something new. Now I have lost hope for a replacement in my lifetime as that was the final option. Maybe Iti 007 will turn out to be a benign antipsychotic though…we can only hope.
Also bare in mind that the amount of funding that has gone into CBD research so far pales by comparison with other less controversial compounds and is only recently starting to really take off now that medicinal cannabis and its subsequent legalisation presents more opportunity for unprejudiced open-domain research. It’s yet another hopeful prospect!
You will not see any official statement ever suggest a research stage proposition as a “replacement” for an established treatment. Not until the data is conclusive. And it takes a lot of hoop-jumping to get any research to that point. If only more millionaires were philanthropists!