Smoking is without a doubt one of the absolute worst things you can be doing as far as your health is concerned – and for women continuing to smoke while pregnant, more and more research is now pointing out just how harmful this is to you child – both while in the womb and also in the long run.
A recent German study conducted on mice at the Free University of Berlin found that mums who smoke while expecting put their children at risk of hearing problems. What the researchers found, was that nicotine exposure before birth (and also during breastfeeding) can cause a key brain region that processes sound to develop abnormally.
According to lead researcher, Professor Ursula Koch, the research, which was published in The Journal of Physiology, is the first to demonstrate that the auditory brain stem is vulnerable to nicotine exposure.
Worryingly, while scientists have known for some time that nicotine exposure during pregnancy harms foetal brain development, what this study found, was that children with impaired function in this part of the brain are likely to have learning difficulties and problems with language development – something that might only be noticeable once they reach school age.
This is what Professor Koch had to say about her team’s findings: “We do not know how many other parts of the auditory system are affected by nicotine exposure,” and added that more research is needed about the cumulative effect of nicotine exposure.
In fact, what Professor Marina Picciotto and her team at Yale University found, was that nicotine exposure while in the womb can trigger widespread genetic changes that affect brain cell development long after birth.
And this, according to the researchers, might be why children born to smokers suffer more from attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and also addiction.
This is what Picciotto had to say about the findings:
As well as this, Picciotto and her team found that genes essential to the creation of brain synapses were also heavily affected by the exposure to nicotine – and effect that, in mice, lasted up until adulthood.
