The sixties are over, boomers. Time to stop letting your health go up in smoke. Smoking, in general, is harmful to your health. There's a mountain of evidence to prove that point. So just putting a cigarette in your mouth makes you look pretty foolish, even stupid. However, smoking marijuana, according to a new study, makes you look like a real butt head. Nevertheless, many baby boomers continue to abuse marijuana. Is this risky business part of a new baby boomer trend that could be labeled as "risk-dom"? AgeVenture News Editor and gerontologist, Dr. David Demko thinks so. Here's one case in point.
Middle-aged and elderly marijuana users increase their risk of a heart attack by more than 400% during the first hour after smoking the drug, according to a new study presented at the American Heart Association's annual conference on cardiovascular disease. Researchers collected detailed information on marijuana use in 3,882 patients who had suffered heart attacks. Some marijuana users reported smoking the drug within 24 hours before their heart attack. Still others had used it within an hour of the onset of symptoms.
"To my knowledge, this is the first study to document that smoking marijuana can trigger a heart attack," says Murray A. Mittleman, M.D., Dr.P.H., director of cardiovascular epidemiology at Boston's Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center. "It increases the heart rate by about 40 beats per minute," he says. "It also causes the blood pressure to increase when the person is lying down, and then abruptly fall when the person stands up, often causing dizziness. These effects may pose significant risk, especially in people with unrecognized coronary disease."
"We found that during the first hour after use, the risk of a heart attack is 4.8 times higher than during periods of non-use," says Mittleman. "In the second hour, the risk drops to 1.7 times higher than during periods of non-use. This indicates a rapid decline in the dangerous effects of marijuana on the heart, but the short-term risk is considerable, especially for patients with other risk factors."
Based on the study, the cardiac risks to individual users posed by marijuana appear to be much lower than those associated with cocaine use, which causes much sharper rises in both heart rate and blood pressure, Mittleman says. However, he adds that the overall public health threat from marijuana could be even greater than from cocaine because marijuana use is believed to be more widespread.
The study's findings provide "possible new food for thought" in the ongoing controversy over whether marijuana use for medical purposes should be legalized, he says. In a 1996 referendum in California, voters approved the legal medical use of marijuana, and since then, at least seven other states have passed laws allowing physicians to prescribe the drug, although it is still prohibited by federal law, Mittleman says.
A recent report by The Institute of Medicine, of the National Academy of Sciences, found no significant marijuana-related cardiac risk among younger users, he says. "But part of the problem lies in the fact that we now have millions of baby boomers who are reaching the age when the risk of coronary heart disease increases for both men and women," Mittleman adds.
"Many of these people were users of marijuana when they were in their teens and 20s, and a sizable percentage of them may still use the drug, either frequently or occasionally," he says. "They should at least be aware that their risk of a heart attack suddenly soars each time they smoke the drug."
Mittleman says researchers still aren't sure whether it's the marijuana itself that causes the increased risk of heart attack, or whether it's other components in the smoke such as carbon monoxide, or a combination of the two. "This is an area that warrants further study," he says.
"Given the mounting evidence regarding the negative effects of both marijuana and smoking in general, it's surprising that educated, mature adults continue to take such risks", says AgeVenture News Editor, Dr. David Demko. "This study doesn't exactly support the old notion that with age comes wisdom". Aging boomers feel that with only a "few good years left", they might as well indulge themselves, regardless of the health risks. If that's the case, maybe that old notion about age and wisdom needs to be updated. How does this sound, "with age comes risk-dom"?
It wouldn't be the first time baby boomers changed the world to suit their own purposes. There's already evidence of what Demko calls the new "risk-dom" trend among boomers. One case in point is the increasing popularity of the new National Geographic "Adventure Magazine" that documents plenty of boomer risk-takers constantly pushing the envelope, sometimes with disastrous effects.
AgeVenture News Service,
www.demko.com