Evidence map›Paper›PMID 39516285›Full record

ReviewEuropean archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience2025

Evidence synthesis of medical cannabis research: current challenges and opportunities.

Ben Senator, Mafalda Pardal, Liesbeth Vandam

Abstract readReview
In one paragraph

Review in European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
5citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

5 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Article
  3. Article
  4. Article
  5. Cannabis use in Europe.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2025
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Ben SenatorRAND Corporation and Pardee RAND Graduate School, Santa Monica, California, USA. senator@pardeerand.edu.ORCID https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4013-5190
Mafalda PardalRAND Europe, Brussels, Belgium.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2553-7897
Liesbeth VandamEUDA, Lisbon, Portugal.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

As a wide group of medicines, the effectiveness and safety of 'medical cannabis' products is likely to vary in relation to product-specific dimensions such as potency, dosage, route of administration, and cannabinoid composition. Systematic reviews can perform a crucial role in analysing and synthesising the outcomes of medical cannabis interventions found in empirical research. We analysed 23 contemporary systematic reviews on the effectiveness and safety of medical cannabis to discern the extent to which this body of work aimed to capture, and ultimately captured, the differing outcomes of medical cannabis products by product-specific dimensions of treatment. We further highlighted the methodological reasons given by authors for an inability to describe this granular level of information. We found that a minority of systematic reviews explicitly aimed to perform a subgroup analysis to determine differences in treatment outcomes by product-specific dimensions of medical cannabis, with even fewer subsequently doing so. Authors' stated reasons for this concerned either overly large or overly small levels of variation in the characteristics, compositions, and administrations of medical cannabis products used, rendering subgroup analyses methodologically inappropriate or inapplicable. Furthering systematic reviews' abilities to capture granular information on medical cannabis treatment outcomes in relation to product-specific dimensions of treatments will require further standardisation of treatments in empirical studies.

Indexed as

Biomedical ResearchMedical MarijuanaHumansMedical MarijuanaCannabinoidsCannabisEvidence synthesisMedical cannabisMeta-analysisSystematic review

Identifiers

PMID39516285
PMCPMC11910438

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.