Panayotis Thanos
University at Buffalo, NY·Neuroscience
More and more pregnant people use tobacco and cannabis together, and cannabis has become more potent in recent years. Little is known about how this combined prenatal exposure shapes children's long-term health.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Pharmacology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
prenatal exposure
prenatal cannabis exposure
prenatal tobacco exposure
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Compare body weight and weight-related behaviors across children with no, tobacco-only, or light or heavy tobacco-plus-cannabis prenatal exposure, and across animals given prenatal nicotine, THC or both, to assess obesity risk.
- Test whether prenatal tobacco and cannabis exposure alters attention and working memory in middle childhood, and in animal offspring during early adolescence and young adulthood.
- Examine whether poor fetal growth, stress reactivity and inflammation explain the effects of combined prenatal nicotine and THC exposure, using human cohort data and an animal model.
More about the research
This project asks how exposure in the womb affects body weight, attention and memory, and what biological processes explain these effects. It pairs a long-running human study with an animal model so that each informs the other.
Why it matters
Combined tobacco and cannabis use during pregnancy is rising, but its effects on children are poorly understood. By linking prenatal nicotine and THC exposure to obesity risk, attention, memory, stress reactivity and inflammation, this work could help clinicians build personalized treatment plans during pregnancy. It could also inform interventions for exposed children, with possible benefits for health from childhood into adulthood.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Natalia M Kleinhans
University of Washington, WA·Neuroscience
Characterize brain differences in newborns exposed to cannabis in the womb, using functional MRI, diffusion tensor imaging and structural MRI during natural sleep at 2 to 4 weeks, compared with matched unexposed infants.
Yasmin L. Hurd
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Neuroscience
Determine how prenatal cannabis or THC exposure disturbs immune-related genes in the placenta and brain, using placentas from women who used cannabis during pregnancy and rats exposed to THC during development.
Christian Hopfer
University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus, CO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether 8 weeks of hemp-derived cannabidiol (CBD), compared with placebo, reduces THC use, cannabis use disorder symptoms, anxiety and depression in emerging adults who use cannabis regularly, using a randomized trial.
The school
University at Buffalo: 32 labs on PI Pages, $542M a year on research, 316 research doctorates a year.
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