--- title: "Scientists Gathered Follow-Up Data on Medical Cannabis Patients and the Results Are Pretty Striking" description: "Researchers revisited thousands of medical cannabis patients and followed their progress for another year, with intriguing results." date: "2025-04-12" modified: "2025-04-12" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/follow-up-medical-cannabis-patients" categories: - "Developments" - "Health & Medicine" - "Medical" tags: - "marijauna" - "medicine" - "sleep" - "studies" --- # Scientists Gathered Follow-Up Data on Medical Cannabis Patients and the Results Are Pretty Striking ![Researchers revisited thousands of medical cannabis patients and followed their progress for another year, with intriguing results.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* Research on the medical effects of marijuana use have been a [mixed]() [bag]() over the last few years; it doesn't seem to be *terrible* for you, but it's not without health — or [social]() — concerns, either. But now we've got some dope news from the world of medicinal pot smokers, suggesting that taking cannabis on the doctor's orders significantly improves the symptoms of multiple ailments, including anxiety, insomnia, and chronic pain, while providing an overall boon to your quality of life. That's according to a [new study]() published in the journal *PLOS One,* which found that medical cannabis patients in Australia maintained a bevy health of improvements over the course of a full year. "This is promising news for patients who are not responding to conventional medicines for these conditions," the authors [said in a statement](). The patients were all adults with various chronic conditions who were recruited as part of a previous study that tracked how they responded to a prescribed cannabis oil. To build on that work, the authors of this latest study followed up with most of these same patients — 2,353 of the original 2,744 returned — for another twelve months, gauging their progress with questionnaires. What they found was encouraging: the patients' initial three-month boost to their health-related quality of life ([HRQL]()), a metric for assessing how someone's health affects their daily life, persisted for an entire year. That included abating the symptoms of anxiety, depression, insomnia, and chronic musculoskeletal pain. While the data is self-reported, the improvements were clinically meaningful, the authors wrote. In short, the findings suggest that medicinal weed's benefits stretch to the long term. A big caveat, though, is that the study had no control group, meaning that the benefits can't confidently be attributed to the green stuff. Another recent piece of observational research, however, echoes some of the findings here. In a [survey of 1,000 people](), 70 percent of respondents said that taking medical cannabis helped them sleep better than actual prescription sleep aids, [as spotted by *Forbes*](). An even higher 91 percent said that cannabis was more effective than over-the-counter sleep solutions. But this work, too, calls for a major disclaimer: it was conducted by a Germany-based medical cannabis company, Bloomwell Group — so make of that what you will. Nonetheless, the company claims it's the largest survey in Europe to explore medical cannabis as a sleep aid to date. "This survey goes a long way in both legitimizing the severity of sleep disorders and the toll these conditions take on people's lives, as well as providing real-world patient evidence that medical cannabis is a highly effective treatment," Julian Wichmann, managing director of Bloomwell, told *Forbes* in a statement. With all that said, it's too early to hail weed, medicinal or not, as a bedtime cure-all. The literature is mixed: some randomized control trials have found that weed does [improve sleep in adults with insomnia](), but other research suggests that regularly relying on the substance to get shuteye [actually leads to *worse* sleep](). It's usefulness as a way of making the burden of countless chronic medical conditions more tolerable, though, is hard to deny. **More on marijuana:** *[If You Blazed Massive Amounts of Weed as a Youth, Scientists Have Interesting News]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()