March 18, 2025 – Don't be surprised if your doctor specifically asks during your next checkup whether you use marijuana.
It's not just that it's so common now (1 in 5 people use cannabis). They want to warn you about heart attack risk.
Until recently, there hasn't been a lot of conclusive evidence about the drug's health impacts. But two new studies suggest it carries very serious heart health risks, including that people under 50 who use cannabis are more than six times as likely to have a heart attack, compared to nonusers.
"Asking about cannabis use should be part of clinicians' workup to understand patients' overall cardiovascular risk, similar to asking about smoking cigarettes," Ibrahim Kamel, MD, MHA, a clinical instructor at the Boston University School of Medicine and lead author of both studies, said in a news release. "At a policy level, a fair warning should be made so that the people who are consuming cannabis know that there are risks."
