Prenatal exposure abilities

It has been shown that women exposed to cigarette smoke as well as those with prenatal exposures to their mothers cigarette smoke have substantially less fecundity (the ability to produce offspring within a given period of time) than women who are not exposed to smoke and whose mothers did not smoke during pregnancy. I1112 ... 

Newborn children from mothers who ate oontaminated fish were more likely to exhibit hypoactive reflexes, more motor immaturity, poorer lability of states, and greater amount of startle. Testing at 4 years of age found that prenatal exposure was associated with poorer performance on the Verbal and the Memory scales of the McCarthy Scales of Children s Abilities, as well as less efficient visual discrimination processing and more errors in short-term memory scanning. Evaluation of the children at 11 years of age showed that prenatal exposure was significantly associated with lower full-scale and verbal IQ scores and poorer reading word comprehension. 

Data relative to humans demonstrated developmental delays and impaired cognitive abilities in children exposed to these contaminants. Hyperactivity was also reported when the level of prenatal exposure was relatively higher (Hauser et al., 1998). The robust conclusions of Peter Hausers exhaustive review of DLC contamination and thyroid disruption can be summarized as follows ... 

In a third study the Robert Wood Johnson database of published literature on prenatal cocaine exposure and child outcome was examined (274). Only 8 of 101 studies focused on school-age children. Intelligence quotient (IQ), receptive language, and expressive language were measured. This meta-analysis showed an average difference of 3.12 IQ points between cocaine-exposed and control groups. When the IQ distribution is shifted downwards by this amount, there is a 1.6-fold increase in the number of children with IQs under 70. The authors noted that the calculated decrement in IQ in exposed children is subtle and does not include the possible effect of the drug on domains of function such as language abilities. 

The long-term consequences of prenatal cocaine exposure in school-age children on intelligence, visuomotor skills, and motor abilities have been studied by comparing 101 children exposed perinatally to cocaine with 130 unexposed children at age 7 years (332). The children who were exposed prenatally to cocaine continued to... 

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