Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Generation R Study Group, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Department of Psychiatry, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Biol Psychiatry. 2016 Jun 15;79(12):971-9. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.08.024. Epub 2015 Sep 1.
Cannabis use during pregnancy has been associated with negative behavioral outcomes and psychopathology in offspring. However, there has been little research evaluating alterations in brain structure as a result of maternal cannabis use. In this prospective study, we investigated the association between prenatal cannabis exposure and brain morphology in young children.
We matched 96 children prenatally exposed to tobacco only (without cannabis) with 113 unexposed control subjects on the basis of age and gender and subsequently selected 54 children exposed to prenatal cannabis (mostly combined with tobacco exposure). These children (aged 6 to 8 years) were part of a population-based study in the Netherlands, the Generation R Study, and were followed from pregnancy onward. We assessed brain volumetric measures and cortical thickness in magnetic resonance imaging scans using FreeSurfer. We performed vertexwise analyses in FreeSurfer and linear regression analyses adjusting for relevant covariates using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.
Prenatal cannabis exposure was not associated with global brain volumes, such as total brain volume, gray matter volume, or white matter volume. However, prenatal cannabis exposure was associated with differences in cortical thickness: compared with nonexposed control subjects, cannabis-exposed children had thicker frontal cortices. Prenatal tobacco exposure compared with nonexposed control subjects was associated with cortical thinning, primarily in the superior frontal and superior parietal cortices.
Our findings suggest an association between prenatal cannabis exposure and cortical thickness in children. Further research is needed to explore the causal nature of this association.
孕期大麻使用与后代的负面行为结果和精神病理学有关。然而，很少有研究评估母体大麻使用对大脑结构的改变。在这项前瞻性研究中，我们调查了产前大麻暴露与幼儿大脑形态之间的关联。
我们根据年龄和性别，将 96 名仅接触过烟草（不含大麻）的儿童与 113 名未接触过的对照组相匹配，随后选择了 54 名接触过产前大麻（主要与烟草暴露同时接触）的儿童。这些儿童（年龄在 6 至 8 岁之间）是荷兰基于人群的研究——“世代研究”的一部分，从怀孕开始就进行了跟踪研究。我们使用 FreeSurfer 评估磁共振成像扫描中的脑容积测量和皮质厚度。我们在 FreeSurfer 中进行了顶点分析，并使用社会科学统计软件包进行了线性回归分析，以调整相关协变量。
产前大麻暴露与总脑容量、灰质容量或白质容量等整体脑容量无关。然而，产前大麻暴露与皮质厚度的差异有关：与未暴露的对照组相比，大麻暴露组的儿童额叶皮质较厚。与未暴露的对照组相比，产前烟草暴露与皮质变薄有关，主要发生在额上和顶上皮质。
我们的研究结果表明，产前大麻暴露与儿童皮质厚度有关。需要进一步研究来探索这种关联的因果性质。
