Prenatal Nicotine Exposure May Lead to ADHD in Future Generations

According to a new study conducted by researchers at Florida State University College of Medicine, prenatal exposure to nicotine could manifest itself as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children born a generation later. The findings of the study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, showed how a child’s ADHD could be due to an environmentally-induced health condition inherited from a grandmother who may have smoked cigarettes during pregnancy — even if the child’s mother never smoked. The research suggests that changes in a mother’s genome — whether induced by drugs or by experience — may be permanent and can be transmitted to offspring. ADHD, a neurobehavioral disorder, affects about 10 percent of children and 5 percent of adults in the U.S., and researchers have struggled to produce a definitive scientific explanation for the spike in ADHD diagnoses in the last few decades. Some reports show up to a 40-percent increase in cases of ADHD in one generation. One possible contributing factor, although unproven, is that the spike can be attributed to the large number of women who smoked during pregnancy around the time of World War II and in the decades that followed. The research opens up new possibilities to determine exactly how the transmission to future generations occurs, and whether or not successful treatment of ADHD could stop further transmission to the next generation. To read more about this study, click here.