ER Doctors Are Sounding the Alarm on a Fast-Growing Cannabis Illness

janrinok writes:

https://scitechdaily.com/er-doctors-are-sounding-the-alarm-on-a-fast-growing-cannabis-illness/

Hospitals are seeing a striking rise in people with sudden bouts of intense vomiting linked to long-term cannabis use, a condition now formally classified as cannabis hyperemesis syndrome.

With the new medical code, doctors and researchers can better track how often it occurs and how it develops. Many patients are surprised to learn cannabis may be triggering their symptoms, especially since it is commonly used to ease nausea.

Over the past ten years, emergency departments have treated a growing number of people seeking help for abdominal pain accompanied by severe or persistent vomiting. A shared characteristic among many of these patients is long-term cannabis use.

Clinicians only recently gained a standardized way to document this issue. Last month, a diagnostic code for "cannabis hyperemesis syndrome" became available, describing a gastrointestinal condition that begins within 24 hours of the most recent use and can continue for several days. People who develop the syndrome often face three or four bouts of symptoms each year.

On October 1, the World Health Organization added the new code, R11.16, to its International Classification of Diseases manual (ICD-10, currently). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also incorporated the update for U.S. health care providers.

The change offers several practical benefits. With a single, specific billing code, clinicians no longer need to rely on multiple less accurate codes to describe the condition. The new entry also allows providers to recognize repeat episodes more easily by checking a patient's medical records.

For researchers, the update is especially valuable. It provides a clearer picture of how often the condition appears and who is most affected, helping investigators such as Beatriz Carlini track trends that were previously hard to pinpoint.

"It helps us count and monitor these cases," said Carlini, a research associate professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine who studies adverse health effects of cannabis use. "In studying addiction and other public health concerns, we have three sources of data: what clinicians tell us, what people in the communities tell us, and what health records tell us. A new code for cannabis hyperemesis syndrome will supply important hard evidence on cannabis-adverse events, which physicians tell us is a growing problem."

Although cases are increasing, many clinicians remain unfamiliar with the syndrome because it is still relatively new in medical practice.

"A person often will have multiple [emergency department] visits until it is correctly recognized, costing thousands of dollars each time," Carlini said.

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