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Potheads don’t stress easily, say WSU researchers
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jul/31/potheads-dont-stress-easily-say-wsu-researchers
Free full text of the study:
Blunted stress reactivity in chronic cannabis users
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s00213-017-4648-z
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jul/31/potheads-dont-stress-easily-say-wsu-researchers
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Researchers in Chicago, for example, recently found that low doses of THC can relieve stress, while slightly higher doses – enough to produce a mild high – actually increase anxiety.
Cuttler and her colleagues asked a different question: Would a heavy cannabis user still experience stress-relieving or stress-inducing effects after a high wears off?
“There have been studies before that looked at whether people were high or not high,” she said, “but nobody’s looked at sober cannabis users.”
So the researchers recruited two groups of people: 40 who self-identified as chronic users and 42 nonusers. The first group had used cannabis daily or almost daily for at least a year. The second group had used it 10 or fewer times in their life and not at all during the previous year.
All of the participants were required to abstain from using cannabis on the day of testing, although they could use it the night before. The experiment involved a procedure called the Maastricht Acute Stress Test, or MAST.
Half of each group of participants were told to dunk a hand in a container of frigid water and leave it there for 45 to 90 seconds. At the same time, they were told to count backward from 2,043 in intervals of 17, while being chided by lab workers each time they made a mistake. Compounding the stressors, they also had to watch their own faces on a live video feed as they attempted to perform the count.
The other half of the participants – the control group – had a much simpler task. Their nonstressful scenario involved dipping a hand in lukewarm water and counting, forward, from 1 to 25. There was no “negative verbal feedback” and no distracting video feed.
Before and after each test, researchers questioned the participant about his or her stress level. They also took saliva samples to measure levels of cortisol, the primary hormone associated with stress.
Among cannabis users, there was no difference in cortisol levels between those who completed the stressful scenario and those who completed the nonstressful scenario. Among nonusers, however, cortisol levels were significantly higher among those who got the ice-water-and-reprimands treatment.
And while cannabis users reported feeling more stressed after the less-pleasant of the two tests, they showed “a significantly smaller increase in subjective stress ratings” than nonusers, the researchers wrote.
The results surprised Cuttler, who had predicted that daily cannabis users, suddenly without their preferred coping tool, would experience unusually high stress levels during the experiment. But it ultimately confirmed the hypothesis of Ryan McLaughlin, one of the study’s authors and Cuttler’s husband.
[....]
Free full text of the study:
Blunted stress reactivity in chronic cannabis users
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s00213-017-4648-z