— Associations observed when kids were 5 years old
MedPage Today, October 28, 2024
Poor executive function and aggressive behavior at age 5 years was observed among children exposed to cannabis during pregnancy, a cohort study suggested.
Among 250 children, age-corrected standard scores for attention and inhibitory control on the NIH Toolbox Early Childhood Cognitive Composite were about 0.4 standard deviations lower for those exposed to cannabis compared with those who were unexposed (β = -6.1 points, 95% CI -10.8 to -1.4) after propensity score weighting and adjustment for confounders, reported Sarah Keim, PhD, of the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and co-authors.
Exposed children were also more likely to show aggressive behavior, such as hitting in the face using a fist (β=0.17, 95% CI 0.02-0.31), they noted in JAMA Pediatrics.“We embarked on this line of research because we noticed several years ago that there had been an uptick in the prevalence of cannabis use during pregnancy in the U.S.,” Keim told MedPage Today. “We were familiar with research that had been done a couple of decades ago showing some of the harms of [cannabis exposure] to child development and behavior, but that research hadn’t been updated with a more contemporary sample of children.”
Keim added that cannabis use during pregnancy had more than doubled from 2003 to 2017, and the potency of cannabis has also increased dramatically — up to 13 times more potency — in the past couple of decades.
