Research out of Yale connects smoking during pregnancy and problems with attention
Smoking during pregnancy is known to boost the risk of attention problems in children, but a study published on Wednesday suggests that teens who smoke and were also exposed to nicotine in the womb are even more impaired. The U.S. study also found differences in visual and auditory attention problems between boys and girls who smoked — suggesting hormone levels may play a role. “In girls, it affects both types of attention and in boys, it affects primarily auditory attention,” said Dr. Leslie Jacobsen, a psychiatrist at Yale University School of Medicine who led the study. The findings, published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, give new clues about the role smoking and gender differences may play in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, a condition that now affects from 3 percent to 7 percent of the U.S. population. ADHD is three to five times more common in boys than in girls. The condition is marked by hyperactivity and an inability to manage impulses and focus attention. In the study, researchers tested 92 adolescents exposed to smoke in the womb and 89 who were not. The teens were tested to determine how well they could focus on both auditory and visual cues.
In the auditory test, participants were asked to distinguish between letters, sounds and words while they were being distracted by visual images. In the visual task, they were asked to pick out words from a series of letter strings while they were distracted by various sounds. “It is tough, but it is also something that the healthy, well-developed brain is wired to do,” Jacobsen said in a telephone interview. “This is a test that is sensitive to the subtle problems that can happen during brain development.”
The study found that teen boys who smoked and were exposed to nicotine in the womb were the most vulnerable, showing significant problems paying attention to things they heard. Girls who smoked and were exposed in the womb had problems paying attention to things they heard and saw, but the problems varied depending on the level of exposure to nicotine. Those who did not smoke and whose mothers did not smoke while pregnant fared best. Jacobsen said auditory attention is especially important in a classroom setting, where children must listen to the teacher’s instruction. “Maybe you can follow the teacher if nothing is going on, but if you see a bird fly by the window, that derails your attention and you don’t absorb the instruction,” she said. Jacobsen said identifying attention problems can be important to preserving the self image of kids with ADHD, who are often singled out as troublemakers. “It is subtle and it will potentially get attributed to other reasons,” she said.
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