New BrainHealth research reveals tradeoffs on sleep with cannabis use for chronic pain

(Press-News.org) The most frequently reported reasons for medicinal cannabis use are for pain relief and improvements in sleep. Although cannabis is believed to have an interconnected role with both pain and sleep, its effects on chronic pain and sleep architecture have been studied largely in isolation. New research from UT Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth aims to fill this gap.

“Interactions Between Cannabis Use and Chronic Pain on Sleep Architecture: Findings from In-Home EEG Recordings” was recently published in Neurotherapeutics

A total of 339 nights of in-home sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings were collected from 60 adults. One-third (32%) of the participants self-reported chronic pain and 47% self-reported cannabis use.

EEG recordings were collected over seven consecutive nights per participant, measuring total sleep time, sleep onset latency, slow-wave sleep (SWS), rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, and number of sleep disruptions.

Results revealed that cannabis use by those experiencing chronic pain may promote SWS, which is deep, physically restorative sleep critical for physical restoration and immune function that can indirectly provide pain relief.

However, the research suggests a tradeoff between SWS and REM sleep, where the increased SWS comes at the cost of less REM sleep – the kind of sleep that is critical for emotional regulation and memory integration. Additionally, while cannabis may initially enhance SWS, benefits diminish with chronic use.

“For the first time in an in-home setting, we were able to observe how cannabis use and chronic pain interact to influence the brain’s sleep stages,” said Francesca Filbey, PhD, director of the Neuroimaging of Reward Dynamics Lab. “What we found 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.”

“Although those who use cannabis often report subjective improvements to their sleep, our study looked at the objective changes to a specific stage of sleep important for pain regulation,” added lead author Tracy Brown, a UT Dallas cognition and neuroscience PhD student. “Our results indicated that the potential pain-alleviating benefit from increasing SWS comes with the side effect of reducing REM sleep, which may hinder other aspects of quality of life. This nuanced understanding of changes to sleep architecture may help clinicians and individuals who use cannabis understand the full picture of medicinal cannabis use.”

About Center for BrainHealth

Center for BrainHealth, part of The University of Texas at Dallas, is a translational research institute committed to enhancing, preserving, and restoring brain health across the lifespan. Major research areas include the use of functional and structural neuroimaging techniques to better understand the neurobiology supporting cognition and emotion in health and disease. This leading-edge scientific exploration is translated quickly into practical innovations to improve how people think, work and live, empowering people of all ages to unlock their brain potential. Translational innovations leverage 1) the BrainHealth Index, a proprietary measure that uniquely charts one’s upward (or downward) holistic brain health trajectory whatever their starting level; and 2) Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART™) brain training, a strategy-based toolkit developed and tested by BrainHealth researchers and other teams over three decades.

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