{"id":549777,"date":"2026-07-14T20:12:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T20:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/549777\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T20:12:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T20:12:18","slug":"medical-cannabis-may-help-agitation-in-dementia-study-suggests-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/549777\/","title":{"rendered":"Medical cannabis may help agitation in dementia, study suggests \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dennys Gonzalez was sceptical when doctors told him his father could participate in a clinical trial exploring whether medical cannabis could treat agitation in people with advanced dementia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Gonzalez, who helps care for his 87-year-old father, Emilio, said not only were his fears unfounded, but the treatment \u2013 a combination of two common components of medical cannabis: THC and CBD \u2013 greatly eased his father\u2019s distress and frustration.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad would actually get aggressive if you would try to help him with something,\u201d Gonzalez said before the trial.<\/p>\n

But \u201cwhile he was on this treatment, all that changed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The preliminary results of the trial involving 120 patients with advanced dementia near the end of their lives, presented Tuesday at the Alzheimer\u2019s Association International Conference in London, found that most of the patients receiving the THC\/CBD treatment experienced similar benefits. After 12 weeks, agitation eased for nearly 90 per cent of those participants, while less than a quarter of those who received a placebo exhibited less agitation.<\/p>\n

Medical experts said the results suggest that a carefully formulated and administered cannabinoid treatment might help address agitation, a common and unsettling symptom of dementia. The study has not yet been peer reviewed or published.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thrilled to see that because there\u2019s a lot of suffering that\u2019s happening,\u201d said Elizabeth Edgerly, a licensed clinical psychologist and the Alzheimer\u2019s Association\u2019s vice-president of care and support. She said while the findings require confirmation from larger trials, the results \u201clook really promising that it could be something that could help people with advanced dementia\u201d.<\/p>\n

Agitation affects nearly half of people with advanced dementia who are nearing the end of their lives, experts say. It is often difficult to manage and upsetting for patients, family members and caregivers, and can include vocal outbursts, hostility, moaning, groaning, repetitive movements or phrases, throwing things, and hitting, scratching or pushing other people.<\/p>\n

Currently, many such patients are treated with antipsychotics, antianxiety drugs or opioids, medications that often do not help and can cause risky side effects. Edgerly said some of those medications can induce confusion and sedation, and they can cause people to die sooner. \u201cAnything that represents something that\u2019s both effective and safer is a huge improvement over what the standard of care has been,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u2018It doesn\u2019t mean that people should be giving their parents medical marijuana because cannabinoids have their own risks\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Dr Kevin Hill<\/p>\n

Some previous studies have suggested that cannabinoids might help agitation, but others have not, said Dr Kevin Hill, the director of addiction psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He was not involved in the new study and he noted that it used a formulation of the treatment that was developed for the clinical trial and hasn\u2019t been submitted for US Food and Drug Administration approval.<\/p>\n

Hill is a co-author of one of several analyses that found little evidence that cannabinoids were effective for many of the other conditions for which they were being tried and that they carried risks of side effects, including cannabis use disorder.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Hill said, he has prescribed dronabinol, an FDA-approved THC cannabinoid, to patients with dementia and found it \u201cvery helpful in some of those cases\u201d. He said the new study, which was primarily funded by the US National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, seemed carefully conducted and had produced \u201ca very robust finding\u201d.<\/p>\n

The main thing, he and others said, is that such medications should be prescribed and overseen by experienced healthcare providers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s exciting that this presents another option to treat agitation, but it doesn\u2019t mean that people should be giving their parents medical marijuana because cannabinoids have their own risks,\u201d Hill said. \u201cTreatment of agitation should be overseen by a medical professional.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gonzalez, a real estate agent in Miami, said he had wondered if the treatment might have unwanted side effects. \u201cWhen they tell you they\u2019re going to put your dad on something that is based on marijuana, does that mean that my dad is going to be high all the time and he\u2019s going to fall?\u201d Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Medical cannabis may help agitation in dementia, study suggestsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The researchers reassured him that would not happen because the compound included too low a dose of THC to produce a high. Gonzalez said that almost immediately after his father began receiving the treatment, \u201chis behaviour improved, his level of tolerance dealing with other people improved and he would allow you to help him better in tasks like putting on his shoes\u201d.<\/p>\n

The FDA recently gave approval for Auvelity, a drug previously designated for major depression, to be used for agitation in Alzheimer\u2019s<\/a>, a decision the Alzheimer\u2019s Association welcomed because it was the first non-antipsychotic medication approved for that purpose. Edgerly said the cannabinoid study involved a different patient population: Participants had various types of dementia, not just Alzheimer\u2019s, and were either in hospice or medically eligible for hospice care. Experts praised the study for demonstrating that it was possible to conduct a randomised trial with such a frail population.<\/p>\n

Hospice designations are typically for patients expected to die within six months, but Edgerly said the definition can be more elastic for dementia patients, given the unpredictability of their life expectancy.<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s lead researcher, Dr Jacobo Mintzer, a professor in the department of health sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina, said it was named the Libby trial after a woman who suffered from agitation that did not respond well to drugs such as Valium or morphine. He said he realised that with \u201cthis most common human experience, we need to have ways for people to die with calmness, dignity and grace\u201d.<\/p>\n

Researchers took steps to be sensitive to patients\u2019 circumstances while maintaining scientific rigour, he said. Instead of requiring clinic visits, the participants, whose average age was 81, were treated wherever they lived: at home, where three-quarters of them resided, or in nursing homes or other institutions.<\/p>\n

The participants, who were often in hospice for conditions other than dementia, could keep taking their other medications. The treatment was formulated as a digestible oil, so patients did not have to chew it. For those unable to swallow, drops were placed on the tongue or in patients\u2019 feeding tubes, Mintzer said.<\/p>\n

The study \u2013 a phase two trial, which is smaller than the phase three trials considered to provide the most convincing evidence \u2013 was conducted at 10 locations around the US. Just more than half the 120 participants were women; 54 were Hispanic and 18 were black.<\/p>\n

Researchers commissioned a Canadian pharmaceutical cannabinoid company to develop the oil, which contained 2mg of THC and 100mg of CBD per millilitre. Half the participants received a placebo oil. The others received 1 millilitre twice daily for a week, then double that dose for 11 weeks. THC is a psychoactive; CBD is nonintoxicating.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe difference between us and Joe that sells marijuana across the street is that we actually have a purified, biologically active compound, and we did a scientifically valid experiment with this compound at a certain dose at a certain frequency and for a specific indication,\u201d Mintzer said.<\/p>\n

After two weeks, those receiving the treatment scored significantly lower on a standard agitation scale than those receiving the placebo. Independent clinicians found that 84 per cent of those receiving the treatment showed improvement, compared with 31 per cent of the placebo group.<\/p>\n

After 12 weeks, the difference in scores was even greater, and clinicians found improvement for 87 per cent of the treatment group, compared with 24 per cent of the placebo group.<\/p>\n

There were no serious safety problems linked to the treatment, Mintzer said. He reported that 23 per cent of the treatment group and 12 per cent of the placebo group experienced \u201cserious adverse events\u201d, but said those events \u201cwere consistent with those expected in this patient population and included infections, worsening dementia symptoms and death\u201d. Eight people in the treatment group and three in the placebo group died during the study, he said.<\/p>\n

Ryan Vandrey, a professor in the psychiatry and behavioural sciences department at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, said the results support those of a smaller and shorter trial he and colleagues published recently, in which Alzheimer\u2019s patients with agitation were given either a placebo or dronabinol, the THC treatment. He called the new study \u201ca significant advancement\u201d that should prompt more research geared to getting a cannabinoid therapy approved for agitation.<\/p>\n

Vandrey said THC tends to have a calming effect at the low doses used in his trial and the new study. He said CBD has a different pharmacological mechanism and that adding it, as the new trial did, \u201cmay be particularly valuable\u201d by enhancing anxiety-reducing effects and possibly reducing some unwanted side effects.<\/p>\n

He said medical cannabis is \u201cnever a first-line therapy\u201d and should be tried \u201cwhen the existing treatments are either ineffective or cause unacceptable side effects\u201d. Patients shouldn\u2019t obtain it unprescribed or from unregulated sources because it might contain harmful contaminants, he said.<\/p>\n

Gonzalez said that since the clinical trial ended, his father, who also has Parkinson\u2019s \u201cis somewhat back to his old behaviour\u201d, sometimes yelling in frustration and not sleeping as well as he did with the cannabinoid treatment. Gonzalez fears his father might fall when sleeplessness causes him to wander the house at night.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a shame they don\u2019t still have that available,\u201d Gonzalez said. \u201cIt actually worked.\u201d \u2013 This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dennys Gonzalez was sceptical when doctors told him his father could participate in a clinical trial exploring whether…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549778,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[51967,2926,103,12875,61,60],"class_list":["post-549777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-alzheimer-s-disease","tag-dementia","tag-health","tag-health-wellness","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}