Marijuana may have caused man’s painful 12-hour erection, Georgia doctors say in report
A team of Georgia doctors claim marijuana use is likely to blame for a man’s persistent and painful erections.
According to a case report published in the Journal of Cannabis Research in Feb. 2020, a 32-year-old man made two trips to Coliseum Medical Centers in Macon with complaints of a longer-than-normal erection.
One of the erections lasted 12 hours, and the episodes were so severe that doctors had to give the man injections for the erections to subside, the report said.
The authors, who worked for Coliseum Medical Centers/Mercer University in Macon, Southeastern Urology Associates in Macon and Envision Physician Services in Nashville, say in the report that it is the first known case of “cannabis-associated priapism in a patient where all other known causes of priapism have been excluded.”
Priapism is the medical term used to describe long erections not related to sexual stimulation. The erections last more than four hours, and the condition can lead to damage to the penile tissue with “notable destruction” obvious at 12 hours.
If untreated, the condition could cause a permanent loss of sexual function. It must be treated as a “urological emergency,” the doctors wrote.
The man was otherwise healthy, according to the report. As a teenager, evaluations for sickle cell trait and anemia came back negative. Those conditions could cause priapism.
He took no psychiatric or blood pressure medications. A drug screen found no drug use besides marijuana. Drug-induced priapism is common among adults with injected erectile dysfunction drugs being a leading cause, according to the report.
The patient, however, was able to link his marijuana use with the painful erections.
He told doctors he had erections that lasted less than four hours and never required medical treatment when he used the drug as a teen. He quit in his twenties, and during this period, he didn’t have any episodes, doctors wrote in the report.
While in the emergency room, he admitted to smoking marijuana several nights a week for the past six months, including within a two-hour period prior to the episodes.
“During this time, the patient had four or more episodes of a persistent erection lasting close to four hours that were self-resolving,” the report said.
The patient was referred to urology and internal medicine, according to the report.
Marijuana had already been noted as a possible cause of priapism. But in four other cases where the drug was linked to the erections, other conditions prevented researchers from claiming cannabis as the sole cause.
The doctors offered several possibilities for why cannabis might have caused the erections, including the drug’s “direct vascular effects,” according to the report.
“Our patient has a direct, albeit circumstantial, connection between his recurrent (stuttering) priapism and cannabis use,” the report said. “The abstinence and subsequent use of cannabis were the only appreciable factors in this patient’s battle with recurrent, unwanted erections.”
Urologist Dr. Jamin Brahmbhatt told Business Insider that the Georgia team’s research was “hypothetical until validated by research.”
“Marijuana is a vasodilator so it could lead to over dilation of the penile vessels,” he said. “Often time marijuana can be tainted with other drugs/chemicals so the additives could be the cause of the problem.”
This story was originally published March 2, 2020 at 3:23 PM.