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 Because pot use by mothers and fathers carried similar risk, and a
mother's use before pregnancy had the same effect as use during
pregnancy, the study team speculates that parental pot use is likely
a marker for genetic and environmental vulnerability to psychotic
experiences rather than a cause, and could be useful for screening
kids at risk for psychosis later in life.
Babies exposed to cannabis in the womb do have an increased risk of
being underweight and unusually small when they're born and
developing cognitive and behavior problems early in life, the
researchers note in Schizophrenia Research. Cannabis can also cause
hallucinations in adults, particularly with frequent use and at high
doses, but less is known about the potential for infants exposed to
the drug in the womb to develop psychotic-like symptoms.
For the study, researchers examined data from questionnaires asking
3,692 10-year-olds whether they had symptoms that are similar to
what adults might experience with psychosis: hearing voices that
nobody else detects, seeing things others don't see, and having
thoughts that others might find strange.
They also examined mothers' reports on their own marijuana use as
well as any use by their partners, and they also looked at lab tests
for signs of cannabis in mothers' urine.
When mothers used marijuana during pregnancy, children were 38
percent more likely to have these psychotic-like symptoms than the
children of mothers who abstained from use during pregnancy, the
study found. But children of mothers who used pot only before, but
not during, pregnancy also had a 39 percent higher risk than the
kids of mothers who didn't use it.
Fathers' cannabis use during pregnancy, meanwhile, was associated
with a 44 percent greater likelihood of psychotic-like experiences
in their kids.
"Some children with psychotic experiences are at increased risk to
develop psychosis or other psychiatric disorders," said lead study
author Dr. Koen Bolhuis, a researcher at Erasmus Medical Center
Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
"Unfortunately very little is known about how to treat psychotic
experiences in children, or to prevent them from getting worse,"
Bolhuis said by email.
Psychotic-like experiences aren't disabling or frequent enough to be
classified as psychosis, a severe mental health disorder in which
patients' thoughts and emotions are impaired on such a regular basis
that they routinely experience delusions and hallucinations that
make it impossible to know what's real and what isn't.
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Psychosis can be caused by schizophrenia, and it can also happen as
a result of some other medical conditions and as a side effect of
certain prescription medications or illegal drugs.
In the current study, mothers who used cannabis during pregnancy
were more likely than other women to smoke and drink during
pregnancy, which can both independently influence the risk of
emotional and behavioral health problems in children. They were also
more likely to have partners who used cannabis while they were
pregnant.
The study wasn't a controlled experiment designed to prove whether
or how cannabis exposure might directly cause psychotic experiences
in children.
Researchers also lacked data on how much of infants' cannabis
exposure came from parent's smoking versus ingesting pot.
With inhaled cannabis, it's difficult to separate the impact of the
drug itself from the effect of carbon monoxide also released in the
smoke, noted Marcel Bonn-Miller of the University of Pennsylvania
Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
"Carbon monoxide is a known toxicant which causes hypoxia, or oxygen
deprivation, which has several well-known and well-studied
detrimental effects on pregnancy and offspring development,"
Bonn-Miller, who wasn't involved the study, said by email.
Still, the current study results add to evidence that there's no
safe amount of cannabis exposure for babies in the womb, said Dr.
Nathaniel DeNicola of George Washington University in Washington,
D.C.
"We have sufficient data and biologic plausibility that marijuana
use during pregnancy increases the risk of preterm birth and growth
restricted babies," DeNicola, who wasn't involved the study, said by
email. "The data is mixed on stillbirth, but still cause for
concern."
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2n3QYnv Schizophrenia Research, online July
6, 2018.
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