Emily Bates, PhD
Associate Professor, Pediatrics-Developmental Biology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
The foundation of cardiovascular health is laid in the womb. We will identify new ways to promote lifelong cardiovascular health by studying the impact of potential harmful gestational exposure. How consumption of a cannabis component, cannabidiol (CBD), during pregnancy affects offspring health later in life is understudied. CBD has gained popularity as a natural treatment for nausea, anxiety, pain, and sleep disruption, the common symptoms of pregnancy. However, maternally consumed CBD crosses the placenta and reaches the fetal blood, brain, and heart. Furthermore, CBD acts upon receptors that regulate cardiovascular function and development that are expressed in fetal tissues. This raises the alarming possibility that CBD consumption during pregnancy could disrupt the development of the fetal heart to increase cardiovascular risks in the exposed children. CBD inhibits ion channels that are expressed in the fetal heart and vasculature. Our work and others demonstrated that ion channel activity is essential for morphological development suggesting the highly innovative possibility that CBD-induced inhibition of these channels could alter fetal cardiac development. For example, CBD inhibits voltage-gated sodium and calcium channels that are expressed in the heart. Genetic disruption of these channels causes severe morphological heart defects. CBD targets are also expressed in the developing vasculature, and their inhibition could therefore disrupt angiogenesis. Our goal is to determine how gestational CBD exposure affects cardiac and vascular development in exposed offspring.