Pressman Peter, Hayes A Wallace, Hoeng Julia, Latino Diogo A R S, Mazurov Anatoly, Schlage Walter K, Rana Azhar
Medicine and Social Sciences, The University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA.
College of Public Health, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA.
J Clin Med. 2024 Mar 7;13(6):1540. doi: 10.3390/jcm13061540.
In this overview, we seek to appraise recent experimental and observational studies investigating THC and its potential role as adjunctive therapy in various medical illnesses. Recent clinical trials are suggestive of the diverse pharmacologic potentials for THC but suffer from small sample sizes, short study duration, failure to address tolerance, little dose variation, ill-defined outcome measures, and failure to identify and/or evaluate confounds, all of which may constitute significant threats to the validity of most trials. However, the existing work underscores the potential therapeutic value of THC and, at the same time, calls attention to the critical need for better-designed protocols to fully explore and demonstrate safety and efficacy. In the most general sense, the present brief review illuminates some intriguing findings about THC, along with the basic threats to the validity of the research that supports those findings. The intent is to highlight existing generic weaknesses in the existing randomized controlled trial literature and, most importantly, provide guidance for improved clinical research.
在本综述中,我们旨在评估近期有关四氢大麻酚(THC)及其作为辅助疗法在各种医学疾病中潜在作用的实验性和观察性研究。近期的临床试验表明THC具有多种药理潜力,但存在样本量小、研究持续时间短、未解决耐受性问题、剂量变化小、结局指标不明确以及未识别和/或评估混杂因素等问题,所有这些都可能对大多数试验的有效性构成重大威胁。然而,现有研究强调了THC的潜在治疗价值,同时也提醒人们迫切需要设计更完善的方案,以充分探索和证明其安全性和有效性。从最普遍的意义上讲,本简要综述阐明了一些关于THC的有趣发现,以及支持这些发现的研究在有效性方面面临的基本威胁。目的是突出现有随机对照试验文献中普遍存在的弱点,最重要的是,为改进临床研究提供指导。