Other therapeutic effects of THC reveal stimulation of appetite, and it is used for this effect to treat patients with anorexia and cachexia of advanced cancer [180]. THC is also used in chemotherapy patients due to its effect of reducing nausea and vomiting [181,182]. THC has been shown to reduce acute and chronic pain (for a review see [5,170,183], including neuropathic pain [184,185,186]. THC has also been shown to help overcome some negative symptoms linked to PTSD in war veterans [167,187,188]. There are two synthetic analogs of THC approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that could be prescribed for chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting: nabilone and dronabinol (reviewed in [189]). Nabilone has been shown to be effective in reducing vomiting and nausea [190], whereas dronabinol is currently being assessed for its analgesic properties in patients with breast cancer and in patients with chronic pain [5,167,189], anorexia of HIV/AIDS and cancer patients [191,192]. The antiemetic effects, consisting of the easing of nausea and/or vomiting have also been observed in animal models [189,193,194,195]. Amelioration of activity and motor impairment have been observed in animal models of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) [196] and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) [197].
