Mother's smoking may produce anti-social children

William Atkins
Tuesday, 10 February 2009 18:01

Science - Health

The Cardiff University researchers continue, "The origins of behavior and many common complex disorders may begin in early life, therefore this experimental design could pave the way for identifying prenatal factors that affect behavior in future generations.” [Abstract]

Dr. Anita Thapar, the lead author of the study, stated, "What we have been able to confirm is that cigarette smoke in pregnancy does lower birth weight regardless of whether the mother and child are genetically related or not, but the link with children's behaviour is different.” [ScienceDaily.com: “Researchers Investigate Prenatal Smoking Link With Antisocial Behavior In Children”]

She adds, “It is now clear that offspring anti-social behaviour is more dependent on inherited factors passed from mother to child, as our group of children with mothers who smoked during pregnancy with no direct genetic link showed no increased signs of anti-social behaviour.” [ScienceDaily.com]

Dr. Thapar suggests, “… that other influencing factors such as the mother's personality traits and other inherited characteristics are at play during the development of a baby." [ScienceDaily.com]

The conclusions of their research were published on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The article “Disentangling prenatal and inherited influences in humans with an experimental design” was authored by Frances Rice, Marianne van den Bree, and Anita Thapar, of  the Department of Psychological Medicine, School of Medicine; and Gordon T. Harold, Jacky Boivin, Dale F. Hay, of the School of Psychology—with all of the researchers (at the time of the study) from Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.

To learn more about cigarette smoking, please go to website How Stuff Works, which provides videos and information on the “The Facts about Smoking: The Dangers of Smoking.” Some of the videos look at smoking, from both sides, through conversations between teachers and students.