HEAVY USE OF MARIJUANA CAN CAUSE CYCLIC VOMITING SYNDROME

A case of cyclic vomiting syndrome, the Victim known as Thomas Hodorowski made the connection between his marijuana habit and the bouts of pain and vomiting that left him incapacitated every few weeks, he had been to the emergency room dozens of times, tried anti-nausea drugs, anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants, endured an upper endoscopy procedure and two colonoscopies, seen a psychiatrist and had his appendix and gallbladder removed.

The only way to get relief for the nausea and pain was to take a hot shower.
He often stayed in the shower for hours at a time. When the hot water ran out, “the pain was unbearable, like somebody was wringing my stomach out like a washcloth,” said Hodorowski, 28, a production and shipping assistant who lives outside Chicago.

It was nearly 10 years until a doctor finally convinced him that the diagnosis was cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a condition that causes cyclic vomiting in heavy marijuana users and can be cured by quitting marijuana

Until recently the syndrome was thought to be uncommon or even rare. But as marijuana use has increased because it was legalized, emergency room physicians say they have seen a steady flow of patients with the telltale symptoms, especially in states where marijuana has been decriminalized and patients are more likely to divulge their drug use to physicians.

“After marijuana was legalized in Colorado, we had a doubling in the number of cases of cyclic vomiting syndrome we saw,” many probably related to marijuana use, said Dr. Cecilia J. Sorensen, an emergency room doctor at University of Colorado Hospital at the Anschutz medical campus in Aurora who has studied the syndrome.

According to Dr. Eric Lavonas, director of emergency medicine at Denver Health and a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, said, “CHS went from being something we didn’t know about and never talked about to a very common problem over the last five years.”
Now a new study, based on interviews with 2,127 adult emergency room patients under 50 at Bellevue, a large public hospital in New York City, found that of the 155 patients who said they smoked marijuana at least 20 days a month, 51 heavy users said they had during the past six months experienced nausea and vomiting that were specifically relieved by hot showers.
Extrapolating from those findings, the authors estimated that up to 2.7 million of the 8.3 million Americans known to smoke marijuana daily or near daily may suffer from at least occasional bouts of CHS.
“The big news is that it’s not a couple of thousand people who are affected — it’s a couple million people,” said Dr. Joseph Habboushe, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at NYU Langone/Bellevue Medical Center and lead author of the new paper, published in Basic & Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology.

Others questioned the one-in-three figure, however. Paul Armentano, the deputy director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), said that even with more widespread use of marijuana, “this phenomenon is comparatively rare and seldom is reported” and strikes only “a small percentage of people.”