Younger marijuana users were twice as likely as non-users to experience stress cardiomyopathy, a sudden, usually temporary, weakening of the heart muscle that occurs more commonly in older women.If you use marijuana and experience chest pain or shortness of breath, seek medical help to rule out this infrequent but serious condition.
Stress cardiomyopathy is a sudden, usually temporary, weakening of the heart muscle that reduces the heart's ability to pump, leading to chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness and sometimes fainting.
Data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample identified 33,343 people who were hospitalized with stress cardiomyopathy between 2003-2011 in the United States. Of those, 210 (less than one percent) were also identified as marijuana users.
Compared with non-users, researchers found that marijuana users were more likely to be younger, male with fewer cardiovascular risk factors, including less high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol.
However, despite being younger and with fewer cardiovascular risk factors than non-users, during stress cardiomyopathy the marijuana users were significantly more likely to go into cardiac arrest (2.4 percent vs. 0.8 percent) and to require an implanted defibrillator to detect and correct dangerously abnormal heart rhythms (2.4 percent vs. 0.6 percent).
Marijuana users were more likely than non-users to have a history of depression (32.9 percent vs. 14.5 percent), psychosis (11.9 percent vs. 3.8 percent), anxiety disorder (28.4 percent vs. 16.2 percent), alcoholism (13.3 percent vs. 2.8 percent), tobacco use (73.3 percent vs. 28.6 percent) and multiple substance abuse (11.4 percent vs. 0.3 percent). Because some of these can increase the risk of stress cardiomyopathy, the researchers adjusted for known risk factors to investigate the association between marijuana use and stress cardiomyopathy.
The study has some limitations. Because this was a retrospective study, the researchers could not determine how frequently the marijuana users were using marijuana, or what the timeframe was between the use of marijuana and occurrence of stress cardiomyopathy. Observational studies are not designed to prove cause and effect; therefore, it cannot be said that marijuana is or is not a direct cause of stress cardiomyopathy. In addition, because the database the researchers used reports regional but not state-by-state statistics, the researchers could not analyze whether possibly marijuana-related heart problems are increasing where use is legal.