Smoking during Pregnancy Can Lead to Psychotic Symptoms Later in Life

I thought this was a pretty important study! Smoke or drink during pregnancy and your child may be more prone to psychosis.

It is well-known throughout the healthcare industry that smoking while pregnant is very unhealthy for a baby. Engaging in such activity limits the amount of oxygen that reaches the unborn child, leads to lower birth rates and more. Research now suggests that smoking while pregnant can also put children at greater risk of developing psychotic symptoms in their teenage years.

In a recent Science Daily release, a summary of this research shows a link between maternal tobacco use and psychotic symptoms. Researchers from Cardiff, Bristol, Nottingham and Warwick Universities studied 6,356 12-year-olds from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children.

Results from this study show that smoking during pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of psychotic symptoms in children. A ‘dose-response effect’ was observed by researchers, which means the risk of psychotic symptoms was highest in children with mothers who had smoked heavily during the pregnancy.

The study also examined the influence of alcohol in pregnancy and found that it only led to increased psychotic symptoms in the children whose mothers had consumed more than 21 units of alcohol a week in the early months of their pregnancy. A few study participants had also smoked marijuana during pregnancy, but it was not found to have any significant association with psychotic symptoms.

Researchers suggest the tobacco exposure in the womb may have had an indirect impact on the unborn child by affecting impulsivity, attention or cognition. It is estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of women in the UK continue to smoke during their pregnancy.

Dr. Stanley Zammit, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University’s School of Medicine and lead author of the study, said in Science Daily, “If our results are non-biased and reflect a causal relationship, we can estimate that about 20 per cent of adolescents in this cohort would not have developed psychotic symptoms if their mothers had not smoked. Therefore, maternal smoking may be an important risk factor in the development of psychotic experiences in the population.”