Children whose mothers used cannabis after the fifth or sixth week of pregnancy may be more likely to develop mental health problems in early adolescence, a new study suggests.
In 2018, 4.7% of pregnant women reported cannabis use and 5.4% did in 2019, according to aFor pregnant women who rely on marijuana to help with nausea, Baranger advised talking to their health care provider.
Baranger and his colleagues analyzed data from 10,631 children who were participating in the NIH brain study. The researchers compared three groups of children:those whose mothers were using cannabis but quit when they learned they were pregnant,The impact of cannabis use was seen in the middle of the first trimester.
The new research is saying that the issues found in the earlier study persist in kids who are 12, said Staci Gruber, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery Program and the Cognitive and Neuroimaging Core at Harvard’s McLean Hospital.
It’s not hard to imagine why cannabis might appeal to some women, Gruber said. “You can understand why they might turn to something like this,” she added. “They might think it’s natural and won’t hurt anything.”The big limitation of the study is that the data set used by the researchers does not have information on how frequently the women were using the cannabis, nor the form they were using, Gruber said.