Cannabis isn’t studied much? Scientific studies are almost 30 thousand

Often, when talking about cannabis, one of the objections mainly made regards the lack of a sufficient number of scientific studies, which can witness the characteristics of cannabinoids and of the entire plant.

How many studies have been conducted on Cannabis as of today?

According to the published report, last October, in the magazine Population Health Management, the total number of peer-reviewed scientific publications dedicated to cannabis would be twenty-nine thousand.

The Israeli researchers, authors of the study, demonstrated how the scientific publications on the topic of Cannabis from 2000 to 2007 had increased by 2 and a half times, passing from the number of 532.664 to over a million and more precisely to 1.282.229.

The authors identified over 29 thousand scientific article on the subject of Cannabis, of which 3.300 dedicated to the use of cannabis in the medical field.
 The first publications on the topic of cannabis were focused on ‘psychiatric’ issues, while in the years 2011-2013 there has been a significant increase in studies in the fields of neurology and of cancer treatment.

Over the years there has been an increase in the number of publications both on infants and on elders.

Fields of study

The specific fields with the major number of publications were HIV with 261 publications, chronic pain 179, multiple sclerosis 118,  nausea and vomit 102 and epilepsy 88. Over 66% of the publications were original studies.

More than half of the publications on medical cannabis come from the United States, followed by Canada.

In view of this trend, the authors foresee an increase of the number of publications on the topic over the next few years.

The Study on THC and CBD

The latest publication, in time order, on cannabis regards the quantity of THC and CBD present in the strains. The study realized by the University of British Columbia in Canada and published in Scientific Reports affirms that they are more or less the same.

Thirty-three different cannabis strains from five authorized producers were examined.
 
Cannabis sativa L. comes from central Asia and was used for thousands of years for therapeutic and recreational purposes and the producers, in order to create very resistant plants in time, concentrated their attention on the genetic diversity of the plant but not on the THC and CBD contents.
 
With this premise the study developed, with the statement that today the market proposes different cannabis varieties with different names, but actually with a quantity of the two main cannabinoids practically the same and hence the differences between the various strains are in fact minimal.
 
The laboratory guided by Susan Murch discovered that in spite of all the different variety names, 24 of these strains were too similar in CBD and THC presence to justify their effects published in such different ways.
 
"Knowing only THC and CBD isn’t enough, we have to learn more about the other present molecules”, Murch stated “I would never have thought I would have worked on cannabis, there is an incredible potential here to discover new chemical substances which can be useful in the treatment of many disorders, like pain management and other chronic conditions".