Annotated Bibliography 4

Tara Link

Haley Stokes

English 1010

April 7th

Annotated Bibliography 4

Key, Alexandra, Melissa Ferguson, Denis Molfese, Kelley Peach, Victoria Molfese, and Casey Lehman. "Smoking during Pregnancy Affects Speech-Processing Ability in Newborn Infants.." Environmental Health Perspectives . 115.4 (2007): 623-628. Print.

SUMMARY

Cigarettes are among the non-medicinal drugs used most widely during pregnancy, especially in Wester cultures. Although the general population of smokers is declining pregnant women show the slowest rate of decline. Numerous studies report that maternal cigarette smoking during pregnancy may have a harmful effect on fetal development. Low birth weight in newborns is the most consistently reported consequence of maternal smoking. Prenatal exposure to tobacco smoke is also linked to various health, behavioral, and cognitive impairments. The Committee on Environmental Health noted increased incidents of asthma, respiratory infections, and middle ear effusions. Recently there was reported lower sociability/negative emotionality during infancy and increased likelihood of conduct disorders during childhood in boys and girls born to smoking mothers. Smoking during pregnancy has many bad health related outcomes.

REFLECTION

Tobacco smoking during pregnancy is known to adversely affect development of the central nervous system in babies of smoking mothers by restricting utero--placental blood flow and the amount of oxygen available to the fetus. Behavioral data associate maternal smoking with lower verbal scores and poorer performance on specific language/auditory tests. They ran some test on both babies whose mothers smoked and babies who mothers were non smokers and the results were: Brainwaves of babies of nonsmoking mothers were characterized by typical hemisphere asymmetries, with larger amplitudes over the left hemisphere, especially over temporal regions. Further, infants of nonsmokers discriminated among a greater number of syllables whereas the newborns of smokers began the discrimination process at least 150 msec later and differentiated among fewer stimuli. CONCLUSIONS: There findings indicate that prenatal exposure to tobacco smoke in otherwise healthy babies is linked with significant changes in brain physiology associated with basic perceptual skills that could place the infant at risk for later developmental problems.