Prenatal tobacco exposure: effects on neuropsychological outcomes and ADHD

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ABSTRACT-KNOPIK This re-revised new investigator R01 seeks funding to investigate the effects of prenatal tobacco exposure on offspring attention problems and associated learning and cognitive deficits. Maternal smoking during pregnancy (MSDP) is a major health concern associated with higher rates of a variety of poor child outcomes, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder, impaired learning and memory, lowered IQ, and cognitive dysfunction. ADHD and many of these childhood outcomes are clinically significant conditions with clear public health implications and also are, in turn, substantial predictors of adolescent drug use problems. However, the evidence suggesting causal effects of MSDP for these childhood outcomes is muddied in the existing literature due to the frequent inability to separate these prenatal tobacco exposure effects from other confounding environmental and genetic factors. Specifically, the vast majority of prior studies provide only limited control for the fact that prenatal exposures may be correlated with parental behaviors that could also act as important risk factors that are in turn transmitted to their offspring. Failure to control for such (possibly heritable) confounding factors may account for a large part of the suggested associations between MSDP and offspring outcomes, resulting in biased effect sizes. Therefore, this application proposes to collect interview and comprehensive neuropsychological lab-based data from 400 families with at least 2 Missouri-born children (aged 8-15 at the time of testing), where the mother smoked during one pregnancy but not during a another pregnancy by the same father (thus, with offspring who are full sibling pairs discordant for prenatal tobacco exposure). This within-mother, between-pregnancy contrast provides the best possible methodologic control for confounding factors, such as heritable and sociodemographic characteristics of the mother that predict increased probability of MSDP, as well as other differences between mothers who do and do not smoke during pregnancy (and their partners). Such confounding factors, if not controlled for, might otherwise artifactually create, or alternatively mask, an association between MSDP and child outcomes (of particular interest for this proposal: memory, executive function, language/reading, and ADHD). Such a design will therefore provide opportunities to accurately determine effect sizes while also allowing us to develop a cohort which, in the future, could be followed longitudinally through periods of increased externalizing symptoms and substance use initiation.