Marijuana harms development in the first trimester of pregnancy

CNN
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If you are pregnant and using any form of cannabis product, please consider stopping.

That’s the conclusion of a new study that found a significant health impact of marijuana use on fetal development early in pregnancy.

“That’s why these findings are especially important: People can often be in their first trimester and not even know they’re pregnant,” said lead author Beth Bailey, a professor of psychology and director of population health research at Central Michigan University School of Medicine in Mount Pleasant.

“Our study goes deeper to look very specifically at a specific time of pregnancy: the first trimester. We found a significant decrease in birth weight of 154 grams. In terms of pounds, it’s about a third of a pound,” she said.

While a third of a pound may not sound like a lot, such a slight drop in weight has been linked to health problems as children get older, Bailey said.

“Low birth weight is one of the strongest predictors of a child’s long-term health and development,” he said. “These children are more prone to developmental delays, higher rates of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), learning disabilities, and have higher rates of emotional problems.”

If marijuana exposure continued through the rest of the pregnancy, birth weight dropped another 31 grams (0.07 pounds), the study found. In addition, the newborn’s head circumference was reduced if marijuana use continued during pregnancy. A smaller head circumference could be a sign that the brain did not develop properly during pregnancy.

“Even when pregnant women stopped using marijuana in the third trimester, the babies were born with a smaller head circumference of about 1 centimeter (0.4 inches),” Bailey said. “What we tell women is that it is not an absolute certainty that her baby’s growth will be affected if she is using marijuana. But we do know that she is at substantially increased risk of that outcome.”

While reducing levels of marijuana use during pregnancy is beneficial, it may not be enough to protect the developing baby, Bailey said, because scientists don’t yet have the research data to see if any level of marijuana use exists. not cause harm to the fetus. .

The safest resource? “My advice to women is to avoid using marijuana during pregnancy and, if possible, to stop using it before you get pregnant,” Bailey said.

The study, posted on tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics, used data from the medical records of 109 pregnant women who delivered at an obstetrics clinic at the Central Michigan Medical School. Those data were compared with data from 171 people who did not use marijuana and served as a control group.

Pregnant people who used marijuana were significantly younger, more likely to be single and covered by Medicaid, and less likely to have a higher education than high school than non-marijuana users.

While the study numbers were small, the research was robust because marijuana use was verified through urine tests, said Brianna Moore, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health in Aurora. She did not participate in the study.

“Urine THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) testing is more objective than self-report, as pregnant people may not want to claim that they are using cannabis,” he said.

According to studies, self-reported cannabis use during pregnancy is about 7%Moore added. However, a 2019 study who analyzed umbilical cords for TCH found that cannabis use during pregnancy can reach 22.4%.

Many pregnant women may use cannabis to treat pregnancy-related symptoms, such as nausea and pain, or as a “substitute” for prescription medications such as antidepressants, Moore said.

“However, one study suggests that very few pregnant people (0.5%) use cannabis strictly for medical purposes,” Moore said. “There is work to be done to understand the contextual, social or individual factors that influence cannabis use during pregnancy.

“That would help identify techniques and tools to limit cannabis use during pregnancy,” he added, “such as mindfulness techniques to deal with stress or ‘triggers’, and over-the-counter medications for nausea and the like.”

Marijuana use during pregnancy is on the rise, Bailey said: “With legalization there seems to be this idea that it should be safe because it’s legal, so many people continue to use it during pregnancy.”

Compounding the problem, studies from the 1990s did not look at specific trimesters and found little overall harm to the fetus from marijuana use, Bailey said. It is possible that some of the older information is currently being distributed on social networks.

“Birth weight was minimally affected back then, and studies showed subtle effects on children’s development over the long term,” Bailey said. “However, what we are seeing with legalization is that people are probably using more, and today we have marijuana strains with stronger THC levels, now that marijuana is grown commercially. We are seeing very large effects on the fetus in the last 10 years of research.”

The impact can be even worse when negative health behaviors are combined. Previous research has “pretty well established” that cigarette smoking during pregnancy has a greater impact on birth weight than marijuana exposure,” Bailey said.

“But when women combine cigarette and marijuana smoking, we see an even greater effect on birth weight than we would get with either alone,” he said.