Any consideration of cannabis as a medicine for infants or children must be approached with special caution and informed, professional medical oversight. Because cannabis constituents interact with the receptors that regulate physical development and a variety of functions throughout the body—including receptors associated with brain development—great care must be exercised. With pediatric patients, the principal conditions for which medical cannabis is used are epilepsy and autism spectrum disorders that do not respond to conventional treatments. Because there are so few emerging pharmaceuticals for childhood cancers, increasingly parents are investigating the use of alternative treatments, including cannabis. All of these disorders are devastating to affected children and their families, so the hope that cannabis might bring relief can be very compelling. Across the Internet, people share stories and videos of children whose serious neurological conditions have been successfully treated with cannabis medicines, especially CBD (cannabidiol). The evidence supporting these accounts is primarily anecdotal, although in 2013, researchers at Stanford University presented a preliminary survey of the use of CBD cannabis with pediatric epilepsy patients in California.201
CANNABIS AND CHILDREN
Preliminary Findings
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