Using Pot While Pregnant Not Tied to Birth Risks

[slimvictor]

Smoking marijuana during pregnancy doesn't appear to increase the risk of preterm birth or other harmful birth outcomes, a new review study suggests.

The researchers did initially find a link between smoking marijuana during pregnancy and an increased risk of having a preterm or low-birth-weight baby. But when they took into account whether the pregnant women also smoked tobacco in addition to marijuana, this increase in risk went away.

In other words, the risk of having either a preterm birth or a baby with a low birth weight was due to tobacco smoking, and marijuana use by itself was not linked to these outcomes, the researchers said.

The findings "do not imply that marijuana use during pregnancy should be encouraged or condoned," the researchers, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, wrote in the October issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. Rather, the lack of a link between marijuana use and harmful pregnancy outcomes suggests that attention should be focused on helping pregnant women to stop using tobacco or other substances known to have adverse effects on the pregnancy, they said.

Previous studies on marijuana use during pregnancy have had conflicting results, with some showing that the drug increases the risk of harmful birth outcomes and others showing no increase in risk. But many of these studies were limited because they did not consistently take into account tobacco smoking, or relied entirely on women's self-reports of marijuana use (which can be unreliable).

In the new study, the researchers analyzed information from 31 previous studies that together included more than 7,800 women who used marijuana during pregnancy and more than 124,000 women who did not use marijuana during pregnancy. The researchers only included studies that were designed in a way that allowed them to analyze marijuana use separately from tobacco use. They also included some studies that used objective measures of marijuana use during pregnancy — such as a positive urine test — in addition to studies that used self-reports of marijuana use.

They found that overall, women who smoked marijuana during pregnancy were 43 percent more likely to have a low-birth-weight baby, and 32 percent more likely to have a preterm birth, than women who didn't smoke marijuana during pregnancy.

But when they looked at women who smoked only marijuana during pregnancy and did not use tobacco, they found that these women were not at increased risk for either preterm birth or low-birth-weight babies. In contrast, women who smoked marijuana and tobacco were 85 percent more likely to have a preterm birth, compared with women who didn't use either substance.

http://www.livescience.com/56036-marijuana-pregnant-preterm-birth-risk.html

 

[slimvictor]

Pot And Pregnancy: No Harm Seen At Birth, But Many Questions Remain

Conner emphasizes that message is still clear: Don't use pot when you're pregnant. "Any foreign substance that doesn't directly benefit maternal or fetal health should be avoided," she says. But the analysis suggests that public health dollars budgeted for preventing bad birth outcomes should be spent to discourage the things with more evidence of harm, such as tobacco or alcohol, she says.

(...)

Moreover, this review, which was published Thursday in Obstetrics & Gynecology, focused only on adverse neonatal outcomes such as low birth weight, preterm delivery and stillbirth. It didn't cover the long-term risk of neurodevelopmental problems such as cognitive difficulties or ADHD. A separate review of evidence published in December found that while the studies in humans on that topic are flawed, "there is a concerning pattern of altered neurodevelopment with early, heavy maternal use of marijuana."

"Any time there's a substance that we're not sure of the effects on the fetus or the mother during pregnancy, unless we know of a strong benefit to using the substance we'd advise not to use it," says Torri Metz, an assistant professor of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Colorado Denver, and an author of that December paper. It also found no solid evidence for the benefits of medical marijuana in pregnancy to prevent nausea. She and her co-author called for high-quality prospective studies to better understand the impact of marijuana use on pregnancy and breastfeeding.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-...-harm-seen-at-birth-but-many-questions-remain


(Bold not in original - I am wondering why they assume that smoking cannabis could not possibly have any positive mental health benefits for the mother. But, it is true that smoking anything is unhealthy, so we clearly need pregnant moms to eat or vape in order to study the effects of the drug itself as opposed to the drug + smoke.)

 

[Felonious Monk]

Glad they're getting closer to normalizing this.

It's incredible what they'll tell women to do to get through pregnancy. My Mom was telling me about a friend who's pregnant right now and she's about to have a Zofran pump implanted in her because her nausea is so bad... Fucking ridiculous.