Study Raises Alarm Over Pregnant Women Using Cannabis
A newly published study conducted by researchers from Columbia University and the University of California, San Francisco raises some alarms regarding women using cannabis while pregnant. While the study is not conclusive, it raises enough concern to be worth noting.
In a nutshell, the rate of Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD) among pregnant women steadily increased between 2011 and 2020. Furthermore, researchers suggest that the rate may not be accurate due to underreporting. It could be much higher than it already is.
What the Researchers Found
Columbia researchers looked at CUD rates over a 6-year period. Their study looked at the cases of 890,000 pregnant women between the ages of 12 and 55. Each of that subjects had continuous insurance throughout the study period. The women represented more than 1.05 million pregnancies in total.
In 2015, the CUD rate was 0.22%. By 2019, the rate had increased to 0.27%. It is not a huge jump by any stretch, but there is more to the data. A concurrent study by the California researchers showed an increase in CUD rates among pregnant women from 0.7% in 2011 to 1.2% in 2017.
Researchers also took a look at self-reported cannabis use, without alcohol, within the previous month. That number skyrocketed from 1.5% in 2002 to 5.4% in 2020. That coincides with more recent research suggesting that about 6% of pregnant women reported using cannabis between 2015 and 2021.
What It All Means
As for what all of this means, the remainder of this post will focus on medical cannabis. It is assumed that pregnant women using cannabis medicinally are doing so to relieve symptoms like pain, chronic nausea, anxiety, and insomnia. If they were not using medical cannabis, they would probably be using prescription or OTC drugs to accomplish the same thing.
That said, an increase in reported cases of CUD is alarming. For the record, CUD is the cannabis equivalent of addiction to other drugs. It is characterized by a user’s inability to abstain despite knowing that continuing to use cannabis could lead to detrimental consequences.
At issue is the fact that we do not know how cannabis consumption impacts a baby in the womb. In fact, we know so little about how babies in utero respond to drugs that nearly every drug one could purchase – both prescription and OTC – comes with a warning for pregnant women. The medical industry would prefer that pregnant women take as few drugs as possible in order to limit the risks to their unborn babies.
Could babies be born with a predisposition to CUD if their mothers used medical cannabis during pregnancy? No one really knows. But is it possible? I would say it is. The fact that CUD rates are increasing among pregnant women simply points us in the wrong direction.
What Are the Other Options?
Fairness dictates admitting that nobody has all the answers. What if a pregnant woman decides to stop using medical cannabis during her pregnancy. What are her other options? I immediately think of a patient who visits Salt Lake City’s Beehive Farmacy, a medical cannabis dispensary in Utah, every month. She purchases medical cannabis to alleviate chronic pain. If she were to forgo medical cannabis, opioids certainly would not be an option.
Perhaps she could try OTC pain relievers. Yet they come with their own side effects that are not necessarily good for babies in the womb. So in essence, there really is nothing a doctor might recommend that we could say with 100% uncertainty would be safe for the baby. Still, the CUD issue bothers me. But that is just me.