A recent study found that people who smoke marijuana may have more heavy metals in their bodies.
The study found that marijuana users had 27% more lead in their blood and 21% more lead in their urine. This information comes from Tiffany Sanchez, who is the lead author of the study and works as an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.
It was further mentioned in the study that there is no safe level of lead in the body. Users of marijuana also had 22% more cadmium in their blood compared to non-users, and their urine showed an 18% increase in cadmium levels, as explained by Tiffany Sanchez.
Both cadmium and lead are substances that stay in your body for a considerable amount of time. Cadmium is absorbed by your renal system (related to the kidneys) and is then filtered out through the kidneys. So, when we measure cadmium levels in urine, it reflects the total amount of cadmium that has accumulated in the body over a long period of continuous exposure to the substance.
The research, which was released in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives on Wednesday, utilized information from the annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) spanning from 2005 to 2018. NHANES monitors the health of Americans over time, providing valuable data for this study.
The study examined the blood and urine samples of 7,254 individuals who reported using marijuana in the past month. What makes this study stand out as "unique" is that it focused on measuring heavy metal levels in the people who use marijuana, whereas most previous studies only measured these metal levels in the cannabis plants themselves, according to Tiffany Sanchez.
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