Studies Find No Link Between Prenatal Cannabis Use And Early Childhood Disorders

Two new studies were released on whether the use of cannabis in early pregnancy raises the risk of developmental disorders and autism in children, Marijuana Moment reports.

The reports, funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no link between prenatal cannabis use and increased risk of early developmental delays up to age 5 or autism spectrum disorder.

The data was drawn from Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC), whose researchers led the teams behind the two studies. Authors said the research was believed to represent the largest number of pregnancies with maternal prenatal cannabis use studied.

In one study, mothers were screened for cannabis use through a questionnaire and urine toxicology test when they began prenatal care, usually around 8 to 10 weeks’ gestation. No increased risk of early childhood developmental delays was found related to maternal prenatal cannabis use. The study found that “maternal cannabis use during early pregnancy was not associated with speech and language disorders, global delay, or motor delay.”

“Our study on developmental delays is the first to examine clinical diagnoses of speech and language disorders, motor delays, and global developmental delays and we looked up to age 5, longer than other studies have done,” said lead author Lyndsay Avalos,  PhD, MPH, a research scientist with the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.

The second study, which focused on risk of autism, included 178,948 children born between 2011 and 2019 to 146,296 KPNC patients. Child autism spectrum disorder diagnoses were obtained from medical records and based on KPNC’s universal pediatric autism screening, and maternal cannabis use was assessed through prenatal care screening. The study found 3.6% of children were diagnosed with ASD. There was no relationship found with maternal prenatal cannabis use.

“In this study, maternal prenatal cannabis use was not associated with childhood ASD after adjusting for potential cofounders,” says the autism study, “including sociodemographic characteristics, other noncannabis substance use and maternal comorbidities.”

The authors said additional research is needed to explore if use of cannabis later in pregnancy could be related to increased risk of developmental delays or autism spectrum disorder.

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