Between 2022 and the start of 2024 doctors from the University of Hanover ran a full clinical trial to see whether people with debilitating back pain could be helped by a cannabis compound.

The compound called VER-01 was extracted from the whole flowerhead of the cannabis sativa plant.

The 820 trial participants were chosen because they had experienced severe lower back pain for at least three months - this is the period required for an illness to be considered chronic.

For the new study, patients with back pain were randomly assigned to take Vertanical’s proprietary liquid cannabis extract or a placebo.

At the end of 12 weeks, patients taking the medication reported a nearly 2-point reduction in pain on an 11-point scale, compared with 1.4 points for those taking placebo.

The difference was statistically significant. Those getting the drug also reported improvements in sleep and physical function.

Patients who continued with a six-month extension phase continued to experience reductions in pain.

The results were published Monday in the journal Nature.

According to the researchers at Hanover there were half a billion recorded cases of low back pain globally in 2022 and they say it's a leading cause of disability and a poor quality of life, sometimes preventing people from working and living independently.

Dr. Matthias Karst the Professor of Pain Medicine at Hanover Medical School was the lead author of the study.

He said many participants were unable to live a normal life at the start of the trial.

He added the same participants showed a marked improvement after the first half of the trial.

"Pain, intensity, sleep mobility and the whole impact for the life so we found that this is, some essential and, highly clinical, highly meaningful improvement, said Karst.

According to the researchers at Hanover most of the participants had previously been treated with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory and antirheumatic drugs which hadn't been effective at relieving their pain.

The researchers said most back pain sufferers are given inflammatory drugs, which pose serious long-term cardiovascular and gastrointestinal risks, or opioids, which can have severe side effects and are highly addictive.

Karst said by relieving pain effectively the participants taking the VER-01 compound were more able to help themselves, exercising more because they experienced much less discomfort, this meant they became more positive in their outlook and more willing to try other treatments, so it resulted in a beneficial chain of events.

Unlike opioids which patients need in increasing dosages to tackle pain, the amount of the compound participants received was reduced during the trial with difference in pain levels, according to Karst.

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