Another Reason to Not Smoke While Pregnant: Violent Kids
Yeah, when you take their cigarettes away…
No, but seriously, it seems that some bad behavior may not be because of crappy parenting — oh, wait. It is because of crappy parenting, namely smoking while pregnant. Some kids have a genetic variant that gets triggered by those prenatal smokes and those kids turn into bad kids.
A new study brought to us by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (a subset of the National Institutes of Health) has shown that exposure to smoke before birth raises the risks for behavioral problems in children and teens. The tobacco affects the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene variant, which is associated with the monoamine oxidase enzyme. This enzyme happens to regulate those nice neurotransmitters like dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin. Something goes wrong in the regulating and well, you got yourself trouble, right here in River City.
And get this, the study shows that the increased risk for bad behavior is different for boys and girls. MAOA has another variant, -L, and if a boy has low MAOA-L activity, he is more likely to have disruptive behavior issues. Quite conversely for a girl — she is more likely to be bad if her MAOA-L is high-activity. The activity levels mean how much or little of the enzyme MAOA is being produced. Also, in girls, it seems that the high-risk girls are prone to reading emotional cues as aggressive, which in turn makes the girls lash back aggressively. And the more mothers smoked, the higher the risks for behavior problems.
The last National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2006-7) showed that 426,000 pregnant women aged 15-44 were current cigarette smokers. I hope those truth ads are helping reduce this number. But then again, if smoking while pregnant produces out-of-control teenage girls, maybe it’s not all bad — Ask Maury.
smoking, drugs, cigarettes, tobacco, prenatal, exposure, smoking while pregnant, monoamine oxidase A, MAOA, gene, enzyme, neurotransmitters, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health
March 26th, 2009 at 7:28 am
Smoking while pregnant puts both the mother’s and the baby’s life at risk. Smoking during pregnancy, can seriously slow fetal growth and nearly doubles a woman’s risk of having a baby with low birth weight, not to mention that the baby can be born with serious defects.