Women Who Smoke in Pregnancy Have Children with Morphometric Brain Anomalies

Reasoning that the best time to investigate the effects of gestational tobacco use on offspring is before the offspring start smoking, these authors studied children before adolescence.

Pregnant women in a Netherlands population study completed mailed-in questionnaires during each trimester. Among the 226 participants, 96 mothers smoked continuously, 17 stopped smoking when they learned of their pregnancy, and 113 never smoked. When the children were ages 6 to 8 years, they underwent magnetic resonance imaging, and the mothers filled out the toddler version of the Child Behavior Checklist. The group of continuous smokers matched the other groups on multiple variables; however, continuous smokers' babies weighed less. Analyses controlled for …