William Atkins
Tuesday, 10 February 2009 19:01
Science -
Health
Page 1 of 3
What could be called "fourth-hand smoke," U.K. researchers find for the first time a link between the tobacco smoking of women during pregnancy and their children who are more likely to behave in anti-social manners.
First-hand smoke has been long called the ill effects caused to people who smoke tobacco products, while
second-hand smoke has been called the health problems that people have when inhaling tobacco smoke from people smoking near to them, such as within a house, inside a car, or other confined spaces.
Recently,
third-hand smoke has been suggested as the adverse health problems in humans caused by tobacco particles that linger in such common materials such as carpets, drapes, and furniture long after smokers have smoked tobacco-related products in such rooms.
However, smoking can also adversely affect the health of babies before they are born—that is, while in the womb of their mother.
What is being called
fourth-hand smoke by this author, Cardiff University researchers studied what hey consider as the first project to research whether smoking during pregnancy can directly produce children that are more likely to have anti-social tendencies.
Previous studies have already shown that smoking while pregnant can cause babies to be born with less weight than babies born to mothers who do not smoke. However, little research has been done on the affects on health and behavior on children born to mothers with the smoking habit during pregnancy.
They state in the abstract to their paper,
“Exposure to adversity in utero at a sensitive period of development can bring about physiological, structural, and metabolic changes in the fetus that affect later development and behavior. However, the link between prenatal environment and offspring outcomes could also arise and confound because of the relation between maternal and offspring genomes.”
Researchers from the Schools of Medicine and Psychology at Cardiff University Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom decided to examine behavioral effects on children born to mothers who smoke.
How did they conduct their study, and what were their conclusions? Please read page two.
