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Título

MEDICAL CANNABIS: SOCIAL HISTORY CONTEXT AND CURRENT APPLICATIONS IN NEUROLOGY - A REVIEW

Resumo

INTRODUCTION: Cannabis is a plant genus native to south-central Asia that includes three different species: Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica and Cannabis ruderalis. More than a hundred compounds with physiological action have already been isolated from the plant, including cannabidiol and tetrahydrocannabinol. The discovery of these compounds allowed the subsequent discovery of a vast biological system called the endocannabinoid system (ECS), which promotes several interactions between different systems and organs. With this new knowledge, new drugs were created aiming at the treatment of all sorts of conditions, mainly neurological, psychiatric and gastric. Investigations of the safety and efficacy of these drugs are still at its beginning, even though its commercialization and use in different diseases are already a reality. OBJECTIVE: To carry out a comprehensive literature review on the use of medical cannabis in various neurological diseases, discussing its social history context and elucidating the applicability of cannabinoids and their results in the light of current scientific evidence. METHODS: A literature review was performed in 2021 using the MeSH terms “Neurology” and “medical cannabis” in PubMED. Clinical trials, systematic review and meta-analyses were included, without restrictions on date of publication and language. RESULTS: Thirty-eight articles were found, from which twenty were analyzed for the writing of this work. Among the twenty articles selected, four were meta-analyses, nine were systematic reviews and seven were clinical trials. As for the diseases studied by each paper, three were about movement disorders, three about pain, three about multiple sclerosis, ten about epilepsy and one about various diseases. CONCLUSION: This work found little evidence in current medical literature that supports cannabis-based treatment for neurological conditions, except in specific epileptic syndromes and in spasticity in the context of multiple sclerosis, both which have been approved in some parts of the world and are already in use. However, the use for Parkinson's disease and chronic pain still needs further evidence. Therefore, the main critics and caveats of this study are that the irrational use of medical cannabis may promote short and long-term harm to patients and their families and that this drug may end in a new historical ostracism because of political and economic reasons.

Palavras Chave

medical; cannabis; applications; neurology;