Cannabidiol in the treatment of schizophrenia
Keywords:
cannabis, cannabinoid, cannabidiol, CBD, schizophreniaAbstract
Objective: To review the clinical evidence of cannabidiol in the treatment of schizophrenia.
Material and Methods: This study is a systematic review. The comprehensive searching was conducted
by searching data from the medical database which was Medline, Embase and Cochrane Library. The
articles published between the year 2009 – 2019, conducted in human and published in English were
selected for the analysis. Keywords using for this study were cannabidiol, CBD, schizophrenia and
schizophrenic.
Results: There were few studies related to cannabidiol for the treatment schizophrenia. The initial search
strategy identified 333 papers. Among these, 30 papers were included after the abstract’s screening. Of
these, only 4 articles met the inclusion criteria. The results of these 4 clinical studies were different. One
study found that CBD associated with clinical improvement of psychotic symptoms as well as amisulpride
antipsychotic whereas 3 studies did not show beneficial effects on psychotic symptoms. However,
majority of these studies indicated that CBD was safe and well tolerate. Adverse events of CBD were not
differed from placebo.
Conclusion: The efficacy of cannabidiol for the treatment of schizophrenia is still unclear due to few
relevant studies. Also, there are many limitations of the study which are a small number of sample size
and the short duration of follow-up time for monitoring treatment effects. Current evidence show that
CBD is quite safe, even if it was used at high dose. However, all adverse events reported in these studies
get from a short-term study. Thus, long-term safety monitoring of CBD is needed.
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