Smoking while pregnant affects children well into adolescence

Prenatal tobacco exposure is known to have negative short-term impacts including preterm birth and low birth weight. Now scientists ague that there are also long-term effects that last well into adolescence impacting executive functions.

Prenatal tobacco exposure negatively impacts children but while until now, scientists found short-term effects, a study coming form Boston Medical Center shows that smoking while pregnant affects children’s behavior well into adolescence.

Published online in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, the study is the first to look at the long-term impact on students in a high school setting and demonstrates the importance of providing more evidence-based smoking cessation programs to women of childbearing age and pregnant women.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that smoking during pregnancy is common across the US, with as many as 8 per cent of women having smoked at some point during pregnancy.

And while most have stopped smoking by the third trimester, most of those that did not quite still had 9 cigarettes per day by the third trimester.

Scientists form Boston wanted to see if besides the well-documented short-term effects, being exposed to tobacco, also has long-lasting consequences.

Their study included teachers which were asked to fill out a Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning – Teacher Form once a year for the sample of students involved in the study. The teachers were not aware of the study aims, but were knowledgeable about the students.

The students involved were 51 per cent male and 89 per cent African American and went to school in an urban community. Teachers filled out at least one BRIEF-TF for 131 adolescents, and the study controlled for demographics, substance exposures other than tobacco, early childhood exposure to lead and exposure to violence.

What the scientists found was that only tobacco was associated with less optimal executive functioning in the classroom for the students, particularly impacting their ability to regulate their behavior.

Scientists focused on executive function as it includes higher level of cognitive organization and management processes that are important for success both in school and in daily life. These skills are learned during childhood and include how to self-manage behavior and how best to organize and act on information.

“Because tobacco is one of the most common substances used during pregnancy – and it’s legal for adults to use – these results indicate the tremendous importance of bolstering efforts to ensure that women of child-bearing age and pregnant women have increased access to evidence-based tobacco smoking cessation programs,” said Ruth Rose-Jacobs, ScD, MS, from Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine who served as the study’s first author.

According to the authors, as little as ten cigarettes a day can have a negative impact on the child’s behavior during adolescence. Scientists are calling for a better information of future mothers in order to prevent the negative outcomes:

“Given that as few as ten cigarettes can have a negative impact, it is imperative that we act on this and provide as much access and education as we can to help prevent these negative outcomes.”