Cannabis gained a lot of popularity during the last few years not only thanks to its recreational use, but also for its potential to improve health (here we talked about interactions between CBD and medicines/drugs).
CBD in particular is famous for its beneficial properties, that can be useful in managing Parkinson’s Desease symptoms, which can be exhausting and difficult to contain.

Many scientific studies are currently highlighting the therapeutic potential of Cannabis and cannabinoids.
CBD has many fans: in fact, cannabidiol is a non-psychoactive compound that can be used in infinite medical ways, one of them is the treatment of symptoms connected to Parkinson’s Desease.

How is Cannabidiol involved in managing neurodegenerative deseases?

During the last few years, there was a significant increase in scientific researches about the correlation between CBD and neurodegenerative deseases.
CBD is the best cannabinoid for this kind of pathologies, due to its ability of giving balance to the body, limiting anxiety and inflammation and relieving many Parkinson’s symptoms or similar illnesses.

CBD is one of the most abundant cannabinoids in cannabis, and its non-psychotropic nature makes it easier to experiment than THC (main responsible of cannabis’ “high” effect).
Cannabidiol has been tested and approved in most of the western countries as safe and non-toxic, and has much less scientific restrictions compared to other cannabinoids thanks to its low risk of collateral effects.
Furthermore, if consumed regularly, it can help body’s health: many studies demonstrated that CBD can reduce inflammation, anxiety, sickness, pain and improve quality of sleep, very important charachteristics for those who fight a neurodegenerative illness.

What’s Parkinson’s Desease?

Parkinson’s Desease is a degenerative illness that involves the central nervous system, charachterized by a progressive development.
It starts manifesting with trembling, rigidity, slower movements and can lead to a complete motor disability.
With progression, other symptoms take over, such as memory loss, aggressiveness and dementia.
In the majority of cases, Parkinson’s is an idiopathic desease, meaning that there aren’t known causes behind it.
However, there’s also a genetic component, for in 15% of cases a first-degree relative of patients is diagnosed with Parkinson’s as well.
This isn’t a rare desease: it comes just after Alzheimer among neurodegenerative illnesses and in USA alone there are 60.000 new cases every year.
Parkinson’s starts by hitting the neurons in a specific area of the brain called “substantia nigra”, where dopamine (a neurotransmitter) is produced.
With development of the desease, dopamine levels decrease and the body can no longer control normal motor functions.
In the meantime, Lewy bodies proliferate: these are abnormal animal protein aggregates which cause cells’ deterioration.
Today, over 10 million peaple have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Desease and the medium life expectation is between 7 and 14 years, for there is no known cure yet.
For these reasons, interest in CBD as an instrument to manage those horrible symptoms is more than justified.

Parkinson’s Desease symptoms

• Trembling
• Progressive slower movements and muscular rigidity
• Compromised posture and equilibrium
• Difficulty in speech, with inconsistent content
• Difficulty in writing (calligraphy often becomes very small)
• Loss of some automatic movements (facial mimic for example)
• Confused reasoning to dementia
• Lack of sleep, outbursts of anger, anxiety, severe depression

CBD for Parkinson’s management

Recent studies demonstrated that CBD can actually be useful in the treatment of many Parkinson’s associated symptoms. It can help reduce movement difficulty, anxiety and depression and lack of sleep, significantly improving quality of life for those who are affected by this illness.

This study published by PubMed and conducted in Brasil showed that a daily cannabidiol-based treatment can improve patients’ lives.
Researchers gave CBD soft capsules in three differents doses to three groups of patients:
300mg per day, 75mg per day and a placebo dose.
Patients that reported an evident improvement in health are of course the ones from the first group.

Several other studies (like this one for example) investigate on CBD’s potential to reduce motore disability caused by Parkinson’s.
However, these studies didn’t give any final result but suggest to go on and to deepen the topic with bigger researches.
Further research is currently needed to completely comprehend how much CBD could help in managing Parkinson’s discomfort, from complications to desease’s progression.
What’s sure for now is that this path has to be followed, for CBD actually has a promising potential, for Parkinson’s and for many other neurodegenerative illnesses as well.