Medical Cannabis Shows Potential to Fight Cancer, Largest-Ever Study Finds
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Hannah Harris Green - Fri 18 Apr 2025 13.00 BST
The largest ever study investigating medical cannabis as a treatment for cancer, published this week in Frontiers in Oncology, found overwhelming scientific support for cannabis's potential to treat cancer symptoms and potentially fight the course of the disease itself.
The intention of the analysis was to solidify agreement on cannabis's potential as a cancer treatment, said Ryan Castle, research director at the Whole Health Oncology Institute and lead author of the study. Castle noted that it has been historically difficult to do so because marijuana is still federally considered an illegal Schedule I narcotic.
"Our goal was to determine the scientific consensus on the topic of medical cannabis, a field that has long been dominated by a war between cherrypicked studies," Castle said.
[...] Castle's study looked at more than 10,000 studies on cannabis and cancer, which he said is "10 times the sample size of the next largest study, which we believe helps make it a more conclusive review of the scientific consensus".
To analyze the massive quantity of studies, Castle and his team used AI - specifically, the natural language processing technique known as "sentiment analysis". This technique allowed the researchers to see how many studies had positive, neutral or negative views on cannabis's ability to treat cancer and its symptoms by, for example, increasing appetite, decreasing inflammation or accelerating "apoptosis", or the death of cancer cells.
Castle says his team hoped to find "a moderate consensus" about cannabis's potential as a cancer treatment, and expected the "best case scenario" to be something like 55% of studies showing that medical cannabis improved cancer outcomes.
"It wasn't 55-45, it was 75-25," he said.
The study overwhelmingly supported cannabis as a treatment for cancer-related inflammation, appetite loss and nausea. Perhaps more surprisingly, it also showed that cannabis has the potential to fight cancer cells themselves, by killing them and stopping their spread.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.