A new health benefit has just been added to cannabis' list as a group of Israeli researchers discovered it could actually repair broken bones and strengthen them in the process.

The team at Tel Aviv University found that a non-psychotropic component of cannabis or marijuana known as cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) can help heal bone fractures in rat, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

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In the study, scientists injected CBD to one group of rats with mid-femoral fractures, and injected CBD and THC — the main psychoactive chemical of cannabis — to another group of rats with the same kind of fracture. After 56 days, the team found that the rats injected with CBD healed better than the rats injected with a control saline mixture. Furthermore, the team also discovered that CBD's enhancing power for fracture healing works only when it is administered alone and not when injected together with THC, Pop Science has learned.

"We found that CBD alone makes bones stronger during healing, enhancing the maturation of the collagenous matrix, which provides the basis for new mineralization of bone tissue," Yankel Gabet of the Bone Research Laboratory at the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at the Tel-Aviv University Sackler Faculty of Medicine and co-author of the study said in a press release.

"After being treated with CBD, the healed bone will be harder to break in the future," he explained.

And since the use of CBD for bone healing won't be psychotropic, Gabet believes the study's results present enough proof for a clinical trial to be conducted.

"While there is still a lot of work to be done to develop appropriate therapies, it is clear that it is possible to detach a clinical therapy objective from the psychoactivity of cannabis. CBD, the principal agent in our study, is primarily anti-inflammatory and has no psychoactivity," he explained, The Blemish reported.

The research also appears to support other previous studies claiming that CBD is capable of repairing mild thigh fractures at least in animals, as per Pioneer News.

And with the results he has in hand, Gabet hopes to one day apply the same treatment to humans.

"Other studies have also shown CBD to be a safe agent, which leads us to believe we should continue this line of study in clinical trials to assess its usefulness in improving human fracture healing," said Gabet.

Tagscannabis, bones, fracture, Study