Volodymyr Hryshchenko
As marijuana becomes decriminalized and more socially acceptable, the health effects of frequent use is beginning to fall under a brighter spotlight among researchers. For every study that suggests cannabis could help stymie diseases like COVID or HIV, others suggest that it increases the risk of landing in the emergency room or getting into car crashes.
For researchers at Central Michigan University, their focus has been on what marijuana use might do during pregnancy. In a new study published in Frontiers in Pediatrics on Tuesday, the authors found that fetuses that are exposed to cannabis as early as the first trimester experience significant decreases in newborn weight. Higher rates of exposure exacerbated these effects, and could even lead to reduced head size.
“We show that even when marijuana use occurred only in the first trimester of pregnancy, birth weight was significantly reduced, by more than 150 [grams] on average,” Beth Bailey, a population health researcher at Central Michigan University and a co-author of the new study, said in a news release. “If that use continued into the second trimester, newborn head circumference was significantly decreased as well.”