A new study finds that marijuana use during pregnancy may increase the risk that a child will develop autism, adding to existing scientific evidence pointing to the negative impact of pot use while pregnant. The large scale study, conducted in Canada before the country legalized marijuana, showed that women who used cannabis during pregnancy were 1.5 times more likely to have a child with autism.
Past studies found that using pot during pregnancy is linked to low birth weight, impulsivity, and cognitive and behavioral issues in children as well as a greater risk of stillbirth. Women often use marijuana early in their pregnancy to avoid medications they feel are harmful, but this is the most sensitive times for the developing fetal brain, the study explained.
The study comes at a time when marijuana use among pregnant women is on the increase in the United States, doubling between 2002 and 2017 despite warnings from medical professionals. In another study concerning opioid overdoses, researchers say the number of overdose fatalities may be as much as 17 percent higher than currently known because many of those deaths are believed to be from cardiac arrest.
Individuals in the California study were presumed to have died from cardiac arrest, but toxicology reports later showed they died from a cocktail of drugs, mostly opioids. The study has implications for assessing an accurate number of drug overdoses, and whether to treat such patients with overdose reversal drugs