The number of young children accidentally ingesting marijuana in the US has rocketed by 1,375% in the last five years, a new report reveals.
The report, released on Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics, examined findings from the National Poison Data System on pediatric exposure to edible cannabis products in children younger than six years old from 2017 to 2021.
The report found 7,043 exposures, signifying a “consistent increase” with the “potential for significant toxicity”.
In 2017, 207 cases of accidental marijuana ingestion were reported. In 2021, there were 3,054, an increase by more than 1,000%.
The majority of the reports, 97.7%, occurred in residential settings. Among such cases, 90.7% were at the child’s own residence and 6.4% were reported at other residences.
According to the report, 22.7% of cases resulted in admittance to hospital. Among those, 8.1% were admitted to critical care and 14.6% to non-critical care.
“There was a significant increase in both ICU [intensive care unit] and non-ICU admissions, whereas the number of patients treated and released decreased when comparing the pre-Covid years (2017–2019) to the Covid years (2020–2021),” the report said.
“Major and moderate effects also significantly increased during the pre-pandemic years compared with the two years during the pandemic.”
Children who consume marijuana may experience problems including difficulty walking or sitting up, as well as a hard time breathing, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns.
According to the study, 70% of cases followed a known outcome, with some degree of central nervous system depression. Other recorded clinical effects included ataxia or poor muscle control, agitation, confusion, tremor and seizures.
Children younger than one year old made up 1.9% of reported cases. Children between one and two made up 14.9% of the cases. Children between two and three and those between three and four years old comprised 27.7% and 24.6% of the cases respectively. Children who were four or five years old made up 18% and those between five and six 12.7%.
The study’s lead author, Marit Tweet, an emergency medicine doctor at SIU Medicine in Springfield, Illinois, said she was most concerned about accidental ingestion in children aged five and younger.
“This age group accounts for about 40% of all calls to poison centers nationally,” Tweet told NPR. “They can get into things, and you can’t really rationalize with them” about the dangers of accidental ingestion, she added.
“They think it looks like candy, and maybe, they just want to eat it,” Tweet said, referring to marijuana edibles created to resemble sweets.
The increase in accidental pediatric marijuana consumption comes as cannabis products become more widely available with more states legalizing medical and recreational marijuana use.
According to state and nationwide census data cited in the Pediatrics report, the number of Americans with access to legal recreational cannabis rose from 68.9 million in 2017 to 134.4 million in 2021 – a 95% increase.