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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Cannabis 'increases the risk of cot death'
Charles Arthur The Independent
Thursday 30 Aug 2001 Fathers who smoke cannabis could be doubling their child's risk of cot death, a new study suggests. Yet the study found no link between sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and mothers smoking the drug, whether around conception, during pregnancy or after birth. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, compared the parents of 239 babies who had died from SIDS with those of the same number of healthy, living children. They discovered that cot-death risk doubled when fathers took cannabis, regardless of whether they smoked the drug around conception, during pregnancy or after birth. The study did not show up any risk increase associated with mothers using cannabis, New Scientist magazine reported. Hilary Klonoff-Cohen and Phung Lam-Kruglick, who did the research, suggested few women in the study admitted smoking cannabis because they knew they might be blamed for any effect. Studies on SIDS have long shown that if one or both parents smoked tobacco, it multiplied the risk of cot death by as much as 15 times. Previous research suggested that between one third and one half of all cases of SIDS were due to parents smoking during pregnancy and around the baby. Why cannabis should raise the risk of SIDS was not clear. But THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the compound that gets cannabis smokers "high", was said to resemble closely a signalling chemical in the body, called anandamide, that affects sperm and embryos.
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