Medical cannabis is usually used for pain relief and to improve sleep patterns.
Although cannabis is believed to play an interconnected role in both pain and sleep, its effects on chronic pain and sleep architecture have largely been studied in isolation.
New research from UT Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth aims to fill this gap.
“Interactions between cannabis use and chronic pain in sleep architecture: findings from home EEG recordings” was recently published in Neurotherapeutics.
A total of 339 nights of sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings were collected from 60 adults. A third (32%) of participants self-reported chronic pain and 47% self-reported cannabis use.
EEG recordings were collected for seven consecutive nights per participant, measuring total sleep time, sleep onset latency, slow-wave sleep (SWS), rapid-eye motion (REM) sleep, and number of sleep disturbances.
The results showed that cannabis use by people experiencing chronic pain can promote SWS, which is deep, physically restorative sleep that is crucial for physical recovery and immune function that can indirectly provide pain relief.
However, the research also suggested that the increased SWS comes at the cost of less REM sleep – the type of sleep that is crucial for emotional regulation and memory integration.
Furthermore, although cannabis may initially enhance SWS, the benefits diminish with chronic use.
“For the first time in a home environment, we were able to observe how cannabis use and chronic pain interact to influence the brain’s sleep stages. What we discovered was not a simple story of benefit or harm, but a complex pattern that highlights the need for personalized approaches to sleep and pain management,” said Francesca Filbey, PhD, director of the Neuroimaging of Reward Dynamics Lab.
“Although those who use cannabis often report subjective improvements in their sleep, our study looked at the objective changes in a specific sleep stage that are important for pain regulation,” said lead author Tracy Brown, a doctoral candidate in cognition and neuroscience at UT Dallas.
“Our results indicated that the potential pain-relieving benefit of increasing SWS comes with the side effect of reducing REM sleep, which can hinder other aspects of quality of life. This nuanced understanding of changes in sleep architecture can help clinicians and individuals who use cannabis understand the full picture of medicinal cannabis use,” Brown concluded.
