Study: Medical Cannabis Eases Pain, Insomnia in 91% of Seniors

August 28, 2026

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A new preprint out of Colombia adds another data point to a question that's been building momentum for a couple of years now: does cannabis actually help older adults with the everyday complaints that so often get treated with opioids, benzodiazepines, or antidepressants? The study followed 124 patients age 65 and older, median age 74, ranging all the way up to 104, who started physician-supervised medical cannabis treatment through a specialized practice between January 2024 and September 2025. Among the smaller group with enough follow-up data to evaluate, 38 of 42 patients -- 90.5% -- saw their primary symptom, whether that was pain, insomnia, or mood disturbance, improve after starting treatment.

That number is striking, but it arrives with an asterisk worth keeping in view: this is a preprint, posted to a repository without peer review, not a published clinical trial. Still, it lands in the middle of a genuine wave of research on cannabis and aging that's picked up through 2025 and into 2026, as more seniors turn to cannabis products for conditions that have long been managed with drugs carrying real risks of falls, dependency, and cognitive fog in older bodies. Whether this particular study holds up under scrutiny is a separate question from whether the broader trend it reflects is real.

Inside the Study: Who Was Included and How It Worked

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The study was designed as a retrospective observational analysis, meaning researchers pulled medical records after the fact rather than running a randomized trial. The data came from a specialized medical cannabis practice in Colombia, with researchers affiliated with Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Curativa Medical Group, and AUPAC -- the Asociación de Usuaries y Profesionales para el Abordaje del Cannabis y otras drogas, a Spanish-language advocacy and professional group focused on cannabis and drug policy. The paper was posted August 18, 2026 on Research Square, a preprint server where researchers share findings before formal peer review, which means the methodology and conclusions haven't yet been vetted by outside experts in the way a journal-published study would be.

The baseline pool included 124 patients 65 and older who began physician-supervised treatment with standardized cannabis products between January 2024 and September 2025. That's a reasonably sized starting cohort for this kind of niche clinical population. But the number that actually mattered for the longitudinal analysis was much smaller: only 44 patients had at least three months of follow-up data available, and of those, 42 were evaluable for the primary outcome measure. That's a meaningful attrition from 124 down to 42, and it's the sort of detail that matters when judging how much weight to put on the headline figure.

Age-wise, this was very much a geriatric population in the fullest sense. The median age was 74, but the range stretched from 65 up to 104 years old, meaning the sample included patients well into their tenth decade of life -- a group rarely represented in cannabis research at all, let alone in numbers large enough to analyze.

What Improved -- and by How Much

Of the 124 patients enrolled at baseline in the Colombia study, only 44 completed at least three months of follow-up, and nearly all of those evaluable (38 of 42) showed symptom improvement—highlighting a steep drop-off in retention despite strong outcomes among those who stayed in the study.

Of the 42 evaluable patients, 38 -- 90.5% -- showed at least a one-point reduction in their primary symptom during the follow-up period. That's the headline number, and it held across the three symptom categories the researchers tracked: pain, insomnia, and mood or behavioral symptoms. Pain-related and musculoskeletal conditions were the most common underlying diagnoses driving people into treatment, followed by cancer and neurological disorders, which tracks with what you'd expect from an older patient population dealing with arthritis, chronic pain syndromes, and the aftereffects of cancer treatment.

Looking at severity rather than just the yes-or-no improvement count, the researchers found that median severity scores across all three symptom categories dropped from moderate to mild, and each of those drops reached statistical significance. That's a more granular way of describing the same trend -- it's not just that people reported feeling somewhat better, it's that the intensity of their pain, sleep trouble, or mood symptoms measurably declined on whatever rating scale the clinic was using.

Maybe the most reassuring detail in the whole dataset: no patients in the study showed worsening in pain, insomnia, or mood and behavioral symptoms during the follow-up window. In a population this age, where new medications carry real risk of adverse reactions, drug interactions, or simply not working, the absence of any documented worsening across three separate symptom domains is notable, even accounting for the study's small size and preprint status.

Low and Slow: The Dosing Detail That Matters

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One of the more clinically useful findings buried in this preprint has nothing to do with the improvement rate and everything to do with dosing. The researchers report that clinically effective doses generally stayed below 5 milligrams per day of each cannabinoid examined, including both THC and CBD. That's a genuinely low dose by the standards of a lot of consumer cannabis products on dispensary shelves, where a single edible or vape session can easily deliver several times that amount of THC alone.

The researchers frame this as support for individualized dosing protocols rather than standardized one-size-fits-all regimens -- essentially, find the smallest effective dose for each patient rather than starting everyone at the same level and adjusting from there. That approach maps directly onto a principle geriatric medicine has leaned on for decades with other drug classes: start low, go slow. Older bodies metabolize drugs differently than younger ones, with changes in liver function, body fat composition, and kidney clearance all affecting how a substance builds up and clears from the system. A dose that's perfectly tolerable for a 35-year-old can hit a 78-year-old much harder.

It's worth being clear about what these patients were actually using, too. This wasn't unregulated over-the-counter cannabis picked up without medical guidance -- it was standardized cannabis products administered under physician supervision, with presumably consistent cannabinoid concentrations and dosing tracked over time. That distinction matters a lot when interpreting results, since the same low-dose approach applied to inconsistent, unregulated products wouldn't offer the same predictability. Keeping doses low likely also helped limit side effects like dizziness or sedation, which are exactly the kind of adverse events clinicians worry about most when prescribing anything to elderly patients, given the added fall risk.

How This Fits the Bigger Research Picture

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This Colombian preprint doesn't exist in isolation -- it's part of a broader cluster of research examining cannabis use among aging populations that's accumulated over the past few years. A University of Central Florida-led study, published in the journal Psychiatry in 2025 with a version appearing on PMC in 2026, followed 106 medical cannabis users between ages 55 and 74 across the country and found momentary improvements in pain, anxiety, and depression, along with indirect benefits for sleep.

Survey data backs up the clinical findings with a sense of scale. The 2024 National Poll on Healthy Aging surveyed 3,379 adults age 50 and older and found 21% reported cannabis use in the past year. Respondents cited relaxation as the top motivation at 81%, followed by sleep at 68%, pain relief at 63%, and mood at 53%. But that same poll surfaced a real communication gap: 44% of monthly users said they hadn't discussed their cannabis use with a healthcare provider at all -- a disconnect that researchers flag as a genuine safety concern, particularly for patients on other medications with interaction risks.

Not every study tells the same clean story, though. A 2022 study from Canopy Growth and Santé Cannabis looking at Canadian seniors found mixed results -- drowsiness and tiredness improved on the ESAS-r symptom scale, but pain and overall well-being didn't show significant change on that same measure, even though a separate pain-specific tool, the BPI-SF, did show significant reductions. Those inconsistencies across studies likely come down to differences in measurement tools, sample sizes, and study design rather than pointing to one clear verdict on whether cannabis works for older adults.

Taken together, none of this research adds up to a miracle cure narrative, and it shouldn't be read that way. What it does suggest, consistently across several independent studies using different methods in different countries, is that low, carefully supervised doses of cannabis seem to help a meaningful share of older patients manage pain, sleep problems, and mood symptoms -- conditions that are notoriously hard to treat safely in aging bodies without running into the side effects, dependency risks, or interaction problems that come with opioids, benzodiazepines, and some antidepressants.

The Colombian preprint's biggest limitation is right there in the numbers: 124 patients at baseline, but only 44 with enough follow-up to analyze longitudinally, and it hasn't been through peer review. That's not a reason to dismiss it, but it is a reason to treat the 90.5% figure as an early signal rather than an established fact, pending replication in larger, peer-reviewed studies.

For older adults or their family members actually weighing this decision, the practical takeaway is straightforward: talk to a physician who understands geriatric dosing before starting anything, since the effective doses in this research were far lower than what's typical in a lot of consumer cannabis products. Legal status, product standards, and physician access to cannabis guidance all vary widely by state and by country, so it's worth confirming the specific rules where you live before making any changes to a treatment plan.