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Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children

nih.gov

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Re: Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children

#101

Post by moomoo11 »

Is this really surprising?

Any time I had used cannabis I felt like my IQ dropped 20-30 points and I would lose hours of my day where it was difficult for me to learn. It made doing household chores not terrible, but brought out a lot of panic inducing moments and erratic behavior. I was thinking about a 100k other things while doing one thing. Later on I realized I wasn't even doing that one thing so well. Anything that drops cognitive abilities for a moment is going to be awful long term and especially for babies.

I know a lot of people think cannabis isn't bad, but it is intellectually dishonest to disregard the broader effects of effects on cognition. I say that as someone who used to smoke a ton of cannabis.

Not having to rely on drugs to find calmness has made a profound change in my life, and I can't believe that I used to turn to weed, alcohol, etc. when all I needed to be permanently (key word) happy was already present within me. Prior, when the effects went away I spent just as much time craving and suffering heavily.

That being said I don't think it should be criminalized or anything like that. It is up to adults to do whatever, but it is useful to be honest as well. Not everyone uses it for epilepsy, none of the dispensaries here sell CBD products. Its all high THC products meant to "fuck you up"

Re: Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children

#102

Post by eej71 »

darth_avocado wrote: post #12

I’m glad this research is being done. I don’t use cannabis, but I also don’t frown upon it. However some of the conversations on the use of cannabis recently have changed from “it’s a drug, but it isn’t that bad” to “it is completely harmless”. Which in my opinion is very dangerous and could harm entire populations before we have enough research. In my opinion, it should be considered similar category as alcohol, cig…

Agreed. My baseless and unsourced opinion is that the hardware we call the brain which makes consiousness possible can only take so many hits.

Re: Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children

#104

Post by Gatsky »

This is going to be confounded surely... parents who use cannabis during pregnancy are not 'the same as everyone else except they use cannabis'. They probably, or might I say, almost certainly, have higher rates of psychiatric disorders, the propensity for which they pass onto their children.

So the size of the effect will be less than what is claimed, but in any case don't use cannabis during pregnancy.

Re: Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children

#105

Post by dekhn »

ejb999 wrote: post #70
nth_degree wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can help with nausea.

Thalidomide helped with nausea too.

thalidomide is still prescribed and is a highly effective drug. What's your point? The entire narrative about thalidomide completely oversells what happened and distorts people's understanding of drug safety.

Re: Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children

#107

Post by dekhn »

stefan_ wrote: post #77
scythe wrote: post #8

Unpaywalled paper on the same data, showing findings: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

And wouldn't you know it, the title does not match the findings: > Among these 6, none increased the odds of crossing the threshold for clinically significant symptoms by itself. The linked article bizarrely focuses on cannabis, but they looked at "unplanned pregnancies", "maternal alcohol, marijuana and tobaccos use in early pregnancy", "pregnancy complications" and "birth complications". The only finding: > Childre…

The only way I could be sane as a scientist (I'm an ex-scientist) is by ignoring large parts of the literature. In fact, I think one of the greatest skills a scientist can have is to know when not to read a paper or even really consider the title.

My own work in science was deeply quantitative and the bar for evidence was very high. Nearly every time I read a clinical paper (with the exception of professionally run clinical trials with a good statistical design and rigid adherence to protocols), it takes only a little time to find an "invalidating statement"- a description of methodology or a core assumption or a common mistake- for me to realize that investing further time is simply not worth it.

It doesn't mean that I necessarily believe the opposite of the paper, but rather fall back on my own prior assumptions/null hypothesis explanation.

Re: Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children

#108

Post by robocat »

ok_dad wrote: post #92
robocat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most concerning effect of cannabis is its tendency to increase heart rate. Can you please tell me why you think heart rate is more concerning than the psychological effects? Effects which the paper itself mentions and you seem to downplay for some unobvious reason to me. For me, the difficulty is discerning causation from correlation. Anecdotally I know plenty of cannabis users, and many of them have obvious me…

> Anecdotally I know plenty of cannabis users, and many of them have obvious mental issues Do they have actual, diagnosed "mental issues", or are you judging that some of their behavior is out of the norm for your experience and thus it must be a mental issue?

Yes, I have acquaintances and friends with diagnosed mental illnesses that smoke weed. Also the same but don’t smoke.

Yes, I have acquaintances and friends with no psychological problems that smoke weed. Also the same but don’t smoke.

Yes, I have acquaintances and friends with “undiagnosed” psychological problems that smoke weed. Also the same but don’t smoke.

No, I am not a professional psychological specialist.

Yes, I have some experiences to be able to make intelligent “non-professional” judgements about psychological problems. My definition of a psychological problem is one where the problem is seriously negatively affecting ones life, and ones skills are not successfully mitigating or correcting the problem. Environmental issues have a part to play in that. My friends and acquaintances have a wide range of ages.

You seem to be fishing for something - perhaps you could have just made your point instead (with caveats).

Disclaimer: I don’t use any form of THC or CBD. No strong reasons against it, just not my thing. I certainly have nothing against those that want or need to take THC or CBD.

Re: Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children

#109

Post by bergenty »

staringback wrote: post #75
dekken_ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that weed isn't just bad for you, it depends on your condition and the dosage.

Do you need weed to survive?

We have very specific anadomide receptors in the brain that only respond to weed. Don’t know how much of that is hearsay.

Re: Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children

#110

Post by dekhn »

404mm wrote: post #13
1-6 wrote: post #4

Why are pregnant women smoking weed to begin with?

One response I received was: “weed is natural and comes from the Earth”. It’s absolutely mind boggling how stupid people can be.

To steelman this argument (to the extent that I can): we can in fact attribute a great deal of harm to highly processed ingredients, while there are a number of plants and animals humans have lived with and eaten for millenia, and we've identified the natural products that are poisonous. Weed is one of the plants that humans have coexisted with and consumed for millenia, and societies with high weed consumption don't appear to be significantly sicker than ones that don't.

(I can't think of a way to steelman around the fact that there are many toxic plant and animal substances, and some highly processed ingredients are completely harmless)

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