According to a new study on children in New Zealand, using cannabis during pregnancy produces kids who score better on certain brain development tests. On the other hand, alcohol had the opposite effect. When the two drugs were mixed, the kids tended to perform averagely. However, optometry and psychology researchers who conducted the study warned that women should not smoke marijuana because the study also shows that those same children ended up scoring worse on other brain development tests.
The study contained 165 children aged 4 and below; they were instructed to watch multiple dots on a computer screen and indicate in what direction the dots were moving. This was to measure visual discrimination in the brain called global motion perception. Arijit Chakraborty of Auckland University compared the test to spotting a single car at a busy intersection. Chakraborty and his co-researchers discovered that the scores were remarkably better in those children whose mothers used cannabis during pregnancy than those who did not. The more the mothers smoked, the better the test results were.
The children from mothers who drank during pregnancy did worse than those children whose mothers did not drink. However, none of these kids were diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome. The more the mothers drank, the worse the scores were. It turned out that neither nicotine nor methamphetamine had an effect on visual measures in children.
The researchers’ paper was published in the journal Scientific Reports and reports that if they could repeat the canceling-out that occurred when alcohol and cannabis were mixed, then they would be able to research “new ways to prevent or ameliorate the ill effects of prenatal drug exposure.” However, Chakraborty states that women should wait for the results of the study before trying their experiments here:
“We are not recommending on the basis of our findings to start smoking marijuana. Previous studies suggest marijuana had some ill effects on other neurodevelopmental domains. One improvement in one particular neurodevelopmental domain does not suggest holistically the brain is performing better.”
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