According to a large population-based study,
the link between smoking during pregnancy and higher risk for ADHD in the
children born may be linked directly to nicotine exposure in the womb.
by John
Tyburski
Copyright © Daily
Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
Smoking
during pregnancy has been frowned upon for many years, but the exact mechanism
linking smoking to higher risk for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD) in children born to mothers who smoked during their pregnancies has
remained elusive. A report published on Monday in
the journal Pediatrics suggests
that nicotine exposure or related factors may be to blame.
The authors
noted that risk for ADHD was elevated for both children of mothers who smoked
and for children of mothers who did not smoke but who used nicotine replacement
therapy, including nicotine patches. They stress, however, that their findings
do not prove that ADHD is caused by nicotine.
Researchers
at Aarhus University and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in
collaboration with a colleague at the University of California in Los
Angeles, studied 84,803 singletons (persons born with no siblings also born in
the same birth) participating in the Danish National Birth Cohort. Records
revealed whether and how much mothers smoked or used nicotine replacement
during the pregnancies. Children with ADHD were identified from three Danish
medical registries and the seven-year Cohort follow-up.
The
researchers found that both maternal and paternal smoking during pregnancy led
to higher risk of ADHD; the association was stronger for maternal smoking.
Children who were born to smoking mothers and non-smoking fathers had
higher ADHD risk than children with non-smoking mothers and smoking fathers.
Also, ADHD risk was higher in children of mothers who did not smoke but who
used nicotine patches or other replacement during pregnancy, suggesting that
nicotine specifically may increase risk of ADHD.
Smoking
during pregnancy is known to cause low birth weight. The researchers found that
women who had stopped smoking but used nicotine replacement gave birth to
infants of higher, more healthy weights than did mothers who smoked during
their pregnancies.
“The best
advice will at this point probably be to try to stop smoking without use of
nicotine replacement and preferably before getting pregnant,” said Carsten
Obel, senior author of the report. “If this is not possible nicotine
replacement is, based on the birth weight results, preferable in comparison
with continuing to smoke.”
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