SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Marijuana use among pregnant women is rising, and so are concerns:
I'm relatively new to Oregon, but one of the ways I know I'm starting to settle in is my ability to recognize marijuana shops. Some are easy. But others, with names like The Agrestic and Mr. Nice Guy, are a little trickier to identify for someone who hasn't spent much time in a state that has legalized marijuana.
A growing number of states have legalized both medical and recreational marijuana. At the same time, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding are using the drug in increasing numbers. A 2017 JAMA study described both survey results and urine tests of nearly 280,000 pregnant women in Northern California, where medical marijuana was legalized in 1996. The study showed that in 2009, about 4 percent of the women tested used marijuana. In 2016, about 7 percent of women did. Those California numbers may be even higher now, since recreational marijuana became legal there this year.
Some of those numbers may be due in part to women using marijuana to treat their morning sickness, a more recent study by some of the same researchers suggests. Their report, published August 20 in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that pregnant women with severe nausea and vomiting were 3.8 times more likely to use marijuana than pregnant women without morning sickness.
So some pregnant women are definitely using the drug, and exposing their fetuses to it, too. Ingredients in marijuana are known to make their way to fetuses by crossing the placenta during pregnancy (and by entering breast milk after the baby is born). But what actually happens when those marijuana compounds arrive?
That's the question the American Academy of Pediatrics grapples with in a clinical report published in the August issue of Pediatrics. In an effort to provide guidance to caregivers and women, the AAP sums up the existing scientific literature on how marijuana affects mothers and babies.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Wednesday September 12 2018, @09:06AM (4 children)
Yeah about that.... you know that colored underlined text in the summary? The ones that look LIKE THIS [jamanetwork.com]? That's called a hyperlink. If you click it, it links you a different page. Amazing, I know.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Friday September 14 2018, @08:01AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Friday September 14 2018, @01:36PM (2 children)
And yet the other article [aappublications.org] linked in TFS has no less than 97 references listed with along their pmid and it takes less than a minute to find them.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Friday September 14 2018, @04:48PM (1 child)
They found that women who used MJ were anemic and their infants showed a decrease in birth weight. However, higher up in the linked abstract:
This is exactly what I was saying in my first post. These women who use MJ are already the kind of person who'll smoke regular cigarettes, are poorer and already have some other existing stressor. All of these things already explain the anemia and lower birth weights.
This is why I call bullshit on the whole thing. They are suddenly "Concerned" now that MJ is added into the mix!
Where's the evidence that MJ _alone_ is something to be concerned about?
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Friday September 14 2018, @10:16PM
In the references you didn't read like this [embopress.org] or this [sciencedirect.com].
We've always been concerned about how substance use affects fetal development, which is why every gynecologist ever will inform pregnant women that they should stop using certain substances such as tobacco.