Pot extract helps some kids with epilepsy, study says
New research is the first large, rigorous test, suggests marijuana compound is safe and effective
A medicine made from marijuana, without the stuff that gives a high, cut seizures in kids with a severe form of epilepsy in a study that strengthens the case for more research into pot’s possible health benefits.
“This is the first solid, rigorously obtained scientific data” that a marijuana compound is safe and effective for this problem, said one study leader, Dr. Orrin Devinsky of NYU Langone Medical Center.
He said research into promising medical uses has been hampered by requiring scientists to get special licences, plus legal constraints and false notions of how risky marijuana is.
“Opiates kill over 30,000 Americans a year, alcohol kills over 80,000 a year. And marijuana, as best we know, probably kills less than 50 people a year,” Devinsky said.
The study was published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.
The new study is the first large, rigorous test — one group got the drug, another got a dummy version, and neither patients, parents nor doctors knew who took what until the study ended.
It tested a liquid form of cannabidiol, one of marijuana’s more than 100 ingredients, called Epidiolex. It doesn’t contain THC, the hallucinogenic ingredient, and is not sold anywhere yet, although its maker, GW Pharmaceuticals of London, is seeking U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval.
Patients in the study have Dravet syndrome, a type of epilepsy usually caused by a faulty gene. It starts in infancy and causes frequent seizures, some so long-lasting they require emergency care and can be fatal. Kids develop poorly, and their mental impairment seems related to the frequency of seizures — from four to as many as 1,717 a month in this study.
The study included 120 children and teens, ages two to 18, in the U.S. and Europe. They took about a teaspoon of a sweetsmelling oil twice a day (drug or placebo) plus their usual antiseizure medicines for 14 weeks. Their symptoms were compared to the previous four weeks.
Serious seizures with convulsions dropped from around 12 a month to about six for those on the drug and did not change in the others. Three patients on the drug became seizure-free during the study.
Allison Hendershot’s daughter, Molly, was four months old when she had her first seizure, which emergency room doctors medically induced a coma to stop it. Molly, now 12 and who participated in the study, has tried more than half a dozen medicines and a special diet, yet her seizures continued.
Hendershot thinks her daughter, got a placebo because they saw no change in her seizures until the study ended and all participants were allowed to try the drug.
By the second day they saw a difference, and “she went seizure-free for two months. It was pretty remarkable,” Hendershot said.
The fact the drug came from marijuana “did not matter to me at all,” she said.