For 2.5 million people worldwide who have multiple sclerosis, coping with aching, cramping, stiff muscles has been their lifestyle. The same symptoms are also prevalent among the 15 million patients suffering from spinal cord injuries. These painful symptoms cause aches, rob them of their sleep, and limit their movement. Although there are a number of conventional medications that patients can take to reduce inconvenience, the taking of these medicines seldom bring significant relief to patients.
Oftentimes, the drugs that patients rely on to relieve their pain are the ones which cause drowsiness, weakness, and other side effects that are intolerable to some patients. With these considerations, it becomes more clear why patients with spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis have resorted to marijuana in their search for relief. Several patients reported to the IOM that their muscle spasms decreased after marijuana smoking and others further claimed that they appreciated the drug mainly due to the relief it provides from nausea and they have been able to sleep better because of it.
In a poll of people having spinal cord injuries conducted in 1982, twenty-one out of forty-three respondents claimed that marijuana diminished their muscle spasticity, a medical problem whereby muscles tense unreceptively and resist stretching. Likewise, almost all participants during a 1997 poll of one hundred twelve regular marijuana users diagnosed with multiple sclerosis said that the medicine reduced both spasticity and pain.
Even in animal research, marijuana appears to calm muscle spasticity. The spasms are believed to come from regions of the brain in charge of movement, which include a number of sites with plenty cannabinoid receptors. In one experiment, researchers discovered that rodents tended to be more vigorous under the influence of a small quantity of cannabinoids, but not as animated after receiving higher doses.
Unfortunately however, in spite of the suggestive discoveries and the profundity of such anecdotal evidence, antispasmodic properties of marijuana continue untried in the laboratory. The few reports about medical marijuana’s effectiveness are tremendously inadequate in scope; for instance, none of the researchers incorporated over thirteen patients and many others were done on only a single patient. In some cases, the patients’ subjective assessments of improvement conflicted with their physical performances’ objective measures. The lack of a superior commonly effective drug for muscle spasticity then becomes a strong reason to persist on discovering cannabinoid medicines in the clinic.
Patients who suffer from multiple sclerosis (MS), which is a condition of the nervous system that is progressive and has no identified cure, experience failure of the immune system that inflames nerves along the spinal cord, brain, and brain stem. The disease particularly destroys the myelin, which is a protective coating that covers the neural fibres just like that of electrical wire insulation. Nerve cells lose some or all of their capacity to send out impulses without an intact myelin layer. A spectrum of symptoms is produced by this circumstance, including depression, fatigue, blindness, incontinence, vertigo, muscle spasticity, and loss of voluntary muscle control.
Multiple Sclerosis is known by its scarring “sclerosis” which happens in the white substance of the central nervous system subsequent to the loss of myelin and nerves. An estimated 90 percent among those MS patients develop spasticity whereby they experience the condition in a variety of ways. Others experience it mainly in their legs as mild muscle stiffness while others endure constant cramps, involuntary muscle contractions, and aches that are debilitating, painful, disruptive of sleep. The majority of the people who have multiple sclerosis experience irregular “attacks” of muscle spasticity that become progressively more disabling. In worst case scenarios, patients become partially or completely paralyzed.
Baclofen (Lioresal) and tizanidine (Zanaflex) are the medicines most frequently being given to treat MS symptoms to ease both muscle spasms and spasticity. Oftentimes they are only partially effective or even not at all at times. Both are sedatives that they cause patients to become drowsy as well as causing muscle weakness and dry mouth. Muscle weakness becomes debilitating for patients with MS, whose muscles weaken further as the disease continues to develop.
THC and marijuana have both been tested for their influence in easing spasticity in small yet thorough clinical studies. One double-blind experimentation that was conducted incorporated both unaffected individuals and MS patients. MS patients were videotaped while standing on a platform that slid back and forth at unpredictable times. They were taped again after smoking one marijuana cigarette containing about 15 milligrams of THC, which was adequate to make a lot of people feel “high” and to weaken their motor control. Researchers measured the participants’ shoulder movements as an indicator of how well the participants kept their balance. Participants claimed to have their symptoms improve after smoking marijuana.
In three separate clinical studies, the effects of THC on spasticity were tested. These studies registered thirty MS patients in total. In all three trials, participants knew that they would take THC. After the studies, a lot of the patients claimed that prescription with THC reduced their symptoms.
Another test of THC examined a single patient experimenting on THC analog nabilone, an artificial compound that triggers similar cellular receptors like THC. This patient also reported improvement not only in spasticity but also in other MS symptoms. It is true that such clinical outcomes are significantly less striking than the survey and subjective reports of marijuana’s efficacy in easing muscle spasms. However, it is greatly possible that a progression of larger and better-designed clinical tests would generate more convincing evidence supporting medicines that are marijuana-based for multiple sclerosis.
Initial tests on animal representations of a disease are usually required in clinical trials. These studies allow researchers to forecast results for humans. With the information these studies provide, scientists can design experiments that precisely gauge the ability of the medicine to alleviate patients’ symptoms. Although current animal models imitate some symptoms of MS, none have successfully duplicated spasticity. Researchers, however, can use the finest available sign of the condition with what is called the pendulum test to analyse the efficiency of anti-spasticity medicines in human subjects. The pendulum test can help researchers to distinguish THC’s effects against the effects of mild sedatives. If an antispasmodic drug could be developed from THC, its tranquillizing effect could actually be advantageous to MS patients with muscle spasms.
Although the same physiological course results in spasticity with both spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis, different symptoms are produced in these two processes. Patients who have multiple sclerosis are inclined to experience sporadic attacks of stiffness, muscle spasms, and intense pain at rather unpredictable intervals. Patients suffering from spinal cord injuries, on the other hand, experience only slight fluctuations and unrelenting inconvenience and discomfort. It is possible that the same drugs may be accepted in treating these two clusters of patients.
Both multiple sclerosis and patients with spinal cord injury would widely benefit from medications that relieve stiffness, spasms, and pain devoid of the muscle weakening that usually occurs with the best presently accessible treatments. The few optimistic reports of the power of THC and nabilone to diminish spasticity, along with much anecdotal evidence from marijuana users suffering from multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injury, warrants that cautiously designed experiments that test the efficiency of cannabinoids on symptoms such as muscle spasticity are worth conducting.