According to a study published in the online open edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, maternal smoking during pregnancy (MTDP) was associated with neurocognitive deficits in children between the ages of 9 and 12.
Pooja and colleagues from Nebraska University Medical Center in Omaha examined whether MTDP was associated with neurocognitive development in children in a cohort study involving children aged 9 to 10 years at the first (October 2016 to October 2018) and 11 to 12 years old at the second (August 2018 to January 2021) study of adolescent brain cognitive development at 21 sites in the United States.
The researchers found that 1,607 out of 11,448 children had MTDP in the first round. At the first time, patients with MTDP scored lower than those without MTDP on oral reading recognition, sequential memory and vocabulary tests, and cognitive composite scores.
In the second time, these patterns of difference persisted. Structural magnetic resonance imaging showed a smaller cortical area in the anterior, lower parietal, and entorninal regions, as well as lower cortical volume in the anterior, lower parietal, entorinal, and parahippocampal gyrus compared to children without MTDP.
In the second session, different cortical volume patterns were still significant. The frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes show distinct regions of interest; There is no clear distinction between the occipital and insular cortex.
"These results suggest that children with language processing skills and episodic memory associated with MTDP are poor," the authors wrote. Interventions are needed, including expanding access to antenatal and perinatal care and tobacco control policies. ”