Prenatal Cannabis Exposure—An Intergenerational Risk Marker for Neurodevelopment

Cannabis use during pregnancy is increasingly common. In this issue, Keim and colleagues find that prenatal cannabis exposure (PCE) is associated with objectively measured deficits in the executive functions of attention and inhibitory control and with increased observed aggression at age 5 years. PCE was not significantly associated with overall global cognitive ability or other objective measures of executive function and was not associated with any caregiver report of cognition or behavior. The study was conducted between 2016 and 2020 and included 250 mother-child dyads with most study participants living in poverty. The study’s multiple strengths, such as the prospective assessment of cannabis use, objective measurement of child outcomes by standardized testing conducted by blinded assessors to cannabis exposure, and inclusion of multiple confounders, all bolster confidence in the findings.