Doctors for BMJ Case Reports recently dealt with a customer who took CBD for lung cancer daily and reduced the tumor. Therefore, CBD’s use as a prospective treatment option for lung cancer is perhaps worth researching further.
Endogenous cannabinoids play a part in many different bodily functions, including emotion, nerve function, inflammation, pain, immune function, sleep, and metabolism. Phytocannabinoids are chemically akin to endocannabinoids as well as can act on signaling pathways present in cells, which include cancer cells. Cannabinoids have been researched for use in the form of a primary treatment option for cancer but only to have inconsistent results.
Lung cancer is still the UK’s second most prevalent cancer type. Despite cancer treatment developments, survival rates are low five years into diagnosis. Average survival with no treatment is about seven months.
The authors of the BMJ Case Reports report describe the situation of an octogenarian woman who experienced non-small cell lung cancer. The woman also experienced mild COPD, osteoarthritis, and hypertension, for which many different drugs were prescribed to her.
She used to smoke more than a packet of cigarettes weekly. Her tumor size was 41 millimeters at the time of diagnosis, without any evidence of further or local spread. Therefore, she was a candidate for traditional treatment of surgical operation, chemo, and radiotherapy. However, she refused conventional treatment as well as was put under active monitoring, which involved computerized tomography scans every 90 to 180 days.
The scans demonstrated that her tumor size was steadily shrinking from 41 to 10 millimeters from June 2018 to February 2021, as per the report.
The woman stated that she started consuming cannabidiol oil in the form of an alternative treatment for lung cancer in August 2018, soon after her diagnosis. The woman did so as per the suggestion of a family member and after she saw her spouse grapple with radiotherapy side effects. She stated that she consumed 0.5 milliliters of cannabidiol oil, sometimes twice a day and usually thrice daily.
The report on CBD and lung cancer holds promise, but the authors cautioned that it is only a case report. It is unclear which CBD oil components are potentially effective in treating lung cancer. After all, cannabidiol oil also has non-CBD components. This means that further research is essential to determine many factors, including how CBD possibly affects different cancer types.