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Background: Normalisation of medicinal and recreational marijuana use has increased the importance of fully understanding effects of marijuana use on individual-and population-level health, including prenatal exposure effects on child development. We undertook a systematic review of the literature to examine the long-term effects of prenatal marijuana exposure on neuropsychological function in children aged 1-11 years.Methods: Primary research publications were searched from Medline, Embase, PsychInfo, CINAHL EbscoHost, Cochrane Library, Global Health and ERIC (1980-2018). Eligible articles documented neuropsychological outcomes in children 1-11 years who had been prenatally exposed to marijuana. Studies of exposure to multiple prenatal drugs were included if results for marijuana exposure were reported separately from other substances. Data abstraction was independently performed by two reviewers using a standardised protocol.Results: The eligible articles (n = 21) on data from seven independent longitudinal studies had high quality based on the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Some analyses found associations (P < 0.05) between prenatal marijuana exposure and decreased performance on memory, impulse control, problem-solving, quantitative reasoning, verbal development and visual analysis tests; as well as increased performance on attention and global motion perception tests. Limitations included concurrent use of other substances among study participants, potential under-reporting and publication biases, non-generalisable samples and limited published results preventing direct comparison of analyses.Conclusions: The specific effects of prenatal marijuana exposure remain unclear and warrant further research. The larger number of neuropsychological domains that exhibit decreased versus increased psychological and behavioural functions suggests that exposure to marijuana may be harmful for brain development and function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging brain-imaging findings suggest that developmental differences in the structure and activity of brain regions involved in motivation and behavior control may contribute to risky behavior in adolescence. Adolescence may be characterized by robust motivational neurocircuitry that is relatively unhindered by developing cognitive control neurocircuitry. However, how developmental differences in brain structure or function depend on task features or other experimental contexts, or whether observed differences are functionally relevant for real-world risky behavior, is not well understood. The challenge of attributing adolescent risk taking to developmental patterns of brain morphology and brain activity underscores the need for future research sensitive to development and the contexts of adolescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive control has long been a validated construct to explain risk for drug abuse. Research evidence suggests that cognitive-control interventions show promise for future preventive intervention and treatment efforts across development. Biomarkers of the efficacy of these interventions have also been identified. To examine the potential of utilizing developmental cognitive neuroscience to guide cognitive-control interventions for the prevention and treatment of substance use disorders, the National Institute on Drug Abuse held a research roundtable in Rockville, Maryland, in May 2010. The research presented at the roundtable and reviewed in this Special Section of Child Development Perspectives highlights the promise of cognitive-control interventions for enhancing, or ameliorating deficits in, executive functions relevant to substance use disorders, as well as the promise of neuroscience techniques for guiding the conceptualization of these interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]