MARIJUANA USE has been linked to the growing number of young people having strokes.
Chief executive officer of the Heart & Stroke Foundation, Gina Pitts, told the DAILY NATION in an interview that this worrying trend had been particularly present within the past five years.
Highlighting a 24-year-old male patient as the youngest utilising the cardiac rehabilitation centre in Jemmotts Lane, Bridgetown, Pitts said that once a disease affecting mostly women over the age of 65, many more younger people were being afflicted by it.
“A stroke in itself is a blood clot that forms in the brain and behind it, or it is a blood vessel which breaks open in the brain.
“What we do see from marijuana use is that it softens blood vessels and it also encourages blood rates to go up. What we were seeing in the [Barbados National Registry for Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases] was the number of people younger and who were having strokes, one of the similar risk indicators beforehand was smoking marijuana,” the former registrar said. (SDB Media)
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