Cannabis hyperemesis: A brief update

Dirk Hanson‘s post on cannabis hyperemesis garnered another pertinent user comment:

Anonymous said…

My son suffers from this cannabinoid hyperemesis. At this moment he is here at my home on the couch suffering. I have been up with him for 3 days with the vomiting and hot baths. He says this time its over for good. This is our third bout. The first two time we went to ER, they put him on a drip to hydrate him, and gave him some pain medicine and nausea medicine. After a few hours he went home and recovered. This time we went to Urgent Care, put him on a drip, pain med, Benadryl, and Zofran. He felt better. That was yesterday, today we are right back with the nausea, but the Zofran limits the vomiting. I’m hoping tomorrow will be much better. He hasn’t eaten for 3 days. He let me take a video of him at Urgent Care before treatment, and in the video he was heaving and begging himself with tears never to smoke again. My son has smoked for 14 years.

I reviewed several case reports back in 2010. The comment thread was robust (this was originally posted at the Sb version of the blog) and there was considerable skepticism that the case report data was convincing. So I thought I’d do a PubMed search for cannabis hyperemesis and see if any additional case reports have been published. There seem to be at least 17 new items in Pubmed since the Soriano-Co et al 2010 that I referenced in the update.

One in particular struck my eye. Simonetto and colleagues (2012) performed a records review at the Mayo Clinic. They found 98 cases of unexplained, cyclic vomiting which appeared to match the cannabis hyperemesis profile out of 1571 patients with unexplained vomiting and at least some record of prior cannabis use. The profile/diagnosis was created from the prior Case Report literature that I reviewed but unfortunately I can’t get access to this paper to tell you more.

The other thing to think about is the relative increase in case reports in the past year or two. As I think I commented at the time, this is typical of relatively rare and inexplicable health phenomena. The Case Reports originally trickle out…this makes the medical establishment more aware and so they may reconsider their prior stance vis a vis so-called “psychogenic” causes. A few more doctors may obtain a much better cannabis use history then they otherwise would have done. More cases turn up. More Case Reports are published. etc. It’s a recursive process.

I think we’re seeing this at work.

And as more cases emerge, separated in time and space, the denialist position of blaming a contaminated cannabis product (or bad bongs) gets harder and harder to sustain.