There is much political, professional, and cultural debate around the impact that cannabinoids, good or bad, have on health and wellbeing. This month’s “RAPM Focus,” evaluates the relationship between cannabis use and sleep patterns among adult Americans. Editor-in-Chief Brian Sites, MD, interviews authors Calvin Diep, MD, and Karim Ladha, MD, on the paper “Recent cannabis use and nightly sleep duration in adults: a population analysis of the NHANES from 2005 to 2018,” first published in December 2021 (https://rapm.bmj.com/content/47/2/100). The study used observational data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and examined whether recent use of cannabinoids impacted on incidence of too little sleep or too much sleep.

Dr. Diap is a second-year resident in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is also enrolled in the clinician investigator program and will be starting his graduate studies at the Institute of Health Policy Management at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie in using clinician epidemiological methods to study patient-centered outcomes in the perioperative period, such as pain and disability, as well as opioid and cannabinoid use patterns at population levels.

Dr. Ladha is a clinician scientist and staff anesthesiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital at the University of Toronto. He received his medical degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He then completed his anesthesia training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and obtained a master’s degree in clinical epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. His research uses mixed methodologies to obtain a multi-faceted view of pain and recovery after surgery, including retrospective analyses of administrative databases and prospective observational studies in multi-center randomized controlled trials.

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