Large-scale, longitudinal studies of humans whose mothers smoked marijuana once or more per week and experimental work on rodents exposed to cannabinoids in utero have yielded remarkably consistent intellectual and behavioral correlates of fetal exposure to this drug. Some exposed individuals exhibit deficits in memory, cognition, and measures of sociability. These aberrations appear during infancy and persist through adulthood and are tied to changes in the expression of multiple gene families, as well as more global measures of brain responsiveness and plasticity. Researchers currently consider these perturbations to be mediated by changes to the endocannabinoid system caused by the active compounds in cannabis.
The human body contains two primary cannabinoid receptors: CB1R and CB2R. CB1R is present in the human fetal cerebrum by the first weeks of the second trimester, and is the brain’s most abundant G-protein coupled receptor. Located at the presynaptic terminal of neurons, CB1R is activated by ...
