A new study finds that CBD may help anxiety in teens and young adults. After a 12-week treatment window, subjects reported a 42.6% reduction in anxiety.The study was small, and experts say more research is needed.
Cannabidiol, or CBD, the non-psychoactive component of cannabis, could be a promising therapy for treatment-resistant anxiety in adolescents and young adults. new Australian study shows.
After 12 weeks of CBD treatment, study participants aged 12 to 25 reported an average reduction of 42.6% in the severity and impairment of anxiety compared to pre-treatment, find research led by Australian youth mental health service provider and research institute Orygen. Study participants took between 200 and 800 mg of CBD per day, depending on the effectiveness observed.
The study was published today in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
The researchers used two rating scales to assess the effectiveness of the treatment: self-ratings, which found a 42.6% reduction in anxiety symptoms, and the Hamilton Standardized Anxiety Rating, which recorded a 50% reduction .7% of the severity of anxiety.
The study was small, with only 31 participants, but it focused significantly on those who did not show progress with other treatments for anxiety, including at least five sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). However, participants continued to receive CBT treatments throughout the 12-week study.
The study was funded in part by the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney, a philanthropically funded research program specializing in the development of cannabis-based therapies.
This is a hopeful but still early study,” he said Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who was not involved in the research. “Any open trial is just a start, but you have to start somewhere, and this is a start.”
“A handful of studies, some controlled, have shown the benefits of CBD in anxiety-related problems, so the results fit with what we know so far about cannabidiol,” he added.
One of the benefits of CBD is that it appears to have few side effects at low or moderate doses, such as those used in the study.
“Our pilot study found that cannabidiol not only helped reduce anxiety symptoms, but was also very well tolerated: the most common side effects were mild sedation and mild fatigue, but it was in the time when the doses were increased and usually disappeared after a couple of days,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Paul Amminger, PhD, said in a Press release.
“We did not see side effects such as suicidal thoughts, irritability or sleep problems, which are not uncommon in people taking SSRIs.”
Experts praised the research for trying to evaluate the use of new therapies for the treatment of mental health in a pediatric and young adult setting. Still, they had some criticisms about aspects of the study.
For example, the study may not have been rigorous in its definition of “treatment-resistant anxiety.”
“Claiming that a child has ‘treatment-resistant’ anxiety after having anxiety symptoms that persisted beyond five sessions of CBT is an overstatement,” said program director Dr. from the Master’s Program in Cannabis Medicine, Science and Business at Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia. “SSRIs play a significant role in the treatment of anxiety in children, and none of them were exposed to this treatment, it would seem, and therefore cannot claim that the population has ‘treatment-resistant anxiety.'”
Dr. Hayes agreed.
“Especially if there was exposure, as you might expect with anxiety problems, five sessions is quite a limited course of psychotherapy and may not have been adequate to see a therapeutic effect,” he said. “CBT has virtually no known adverse side effects, so it would have been better to test it further.”
Despite these limitations, these findings are a promising direction for further studies.
“We know that the endocannabinoid system has a high proportion of receptors in the brain, which interact with many other neurotransmitters where anxiety and depression manifest,” Worster told Healthline. “Again and again, in animal models, CBD causes greater relaxation in various stressful environments, so we know there is a pathophysiological reason that CBD is a promising therapy for anxiety.”
That said, he urged caution.
“These findings do not mean that CBD is a panacea and that everyone with anxiety will be cured by using it,” he said. “This study moves us toward greater understanding, but many more important questions remain.”
Amminger, the head of the study, seemed to recognize this.
“An open-label pilot study is limited by its design. Seeing a treatment effect in the treatment-resistant group is encouraging, but it could still be a placebo effect,” he said in the press release. After these initial findings, he called for a gold-standard, randomized, controlled study.