Study hints at negative effect on children of cannabis use during pregnancy
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Cannabis use during pregnancy may place children at risk for attention, social and behavioral problems into early adolescence and mental health issues and substance use later on, according to research published in JAMA Pediatrics.
Co-author David A.A. Baranger, PhD, a neuroscientist and postdoctoral research associate at Washington University in St. Louis, said the study “raises a lot of questions” and that “cannabis isn't benign.”
“Mothers using cannabis while they’re pregnant, those rates have been increasing over the past decade or so because cannabis is becoming less criminalized, which is a good thing,” Baranger told Healio. “But that has kind of prompted this kind of increase in cannabis use. There hasn't been a lot of research into what the possible consequences of increased use are, so that's the main reason why we're working on this line of inquiry.”
Baranger and colleagues used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which followed more than 10,000 U.S. children aged 9 to 19 years. As part of the study, the children’s mothers were asked questions about their drug use, both during and before pregnancy.
“We are kind of using the responses to those questions as our measurement of prenatal cannabis exposure,” Baranger said.
According to the reported data, 391 children in the study had mothers who used cannabis before knowing they were pregnant, 208 had mothers who used cannabis after knowing they were pregnant, and the remaining 10,032 had mothers who reported no exposure to cannabis during pregnancy.
Cannabis use during pregnancy was associated with persisting vulnerability to broad-spectrum psychopathology throughout early adolescence, Baranger and colleagues reported, which they said “could lead to greater risk for psychiatric disorders and problematic substance use.”
Baranger said these associations did not change with age, but also cautioned that the small sample size and the fact that the study was observational meant they were not able to prove causation. Baranger said the next step is to examine longer term data in a larger population.
“Most effects in observational studies are going to be small because people are not randomly assigned to certain behaviors,” Baranger said. “So, I think this is a hint at a possible kind of causal effect. But for now, the effects are small, and we can't be 100% positive that it's truly an effect of the cannabis exposure itself and not something else that we were unable to control for.
“I think this study just highlights how much we don't know about the effects of cannabis on pregnancy. We need to do a lot more research into the effects of prenatal cannabis exposure and cannabis exposure in children. There's been so much work done on pregnancy’s effects with say, alcohol, but we know very little about cannabis and its effects.”
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