This is a request for three years of support to carry out secondary analyses of longitudinal mother-child data from multiple waves of the National Longitudinal (12//1/96 -- 1/31/99) Survey of Youth (NLSY) to investigate the long term consequences of maternal smoking during pregnancy on children's behaviors, especially smoking and other forms of drug involvement in adolescence. These analyses will explore further the implications of findings that we obtained on the impact of maternal smoking during pregnancy on adolescent daughters' initiation and persistence of smoking in two different samples, including a 1990 NLSY mother-child sample.
The specific aims are: (1) to assess the unique effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy, controlling for current maternal smoking and other covariates (maternal prenatal drinking and other behaviors, mother and child postnatal characteristics, and sociodemographics), on the smoking of adolescent children: for boys and girls separately; for children of different ethnic groups; and according to birth order: (2) to assess the role of the child's problem behaviors as intervening factors that may partially account for the effect of prenatal maternal smoking; (3) to assess the role of maternal depression in the link between smoking by mothers and children, especially daughters; and (4) to chart and compare the drug use progression to illicit drugs of children who smoked whose mothers smoked during pregnancy and those whose mothers did not smoke. The analyses will be based on mother-child pairs from multiple cohorts and multiple waves of the 1994 NLSY, particularly pairs with a child 10 and over (N = 2,864), with longitudinal data from prior waves. Age- specific risk sets of children range from N =- 168 to N = 4,974. Samples will also include mothers with discrepant smoking during any two pregnancies and their children (N Mothers = 152;313; Children 304;626). Most studies of in utero exposure to cigarettes, alcohol or illicit drugs emphasize effects on the fetus, infants or young children; very few have followed offspring into adolescence or early adulthood, especially to consider outcomes other than physical or cognitive development. The proposed research outlines a novel approach to the understanding of the etiology of smoking and illicit drug use in adolescence. Such understanding has important public health implications not only because of the deleterious long-term health consequences of smoking but because smoking in adolescence is a precursor of progression to other forms of substance use.
| Kandel, D B; Udry, J R (1999) Prenatal effects of maternal smoking on daughters' smoking: nicotine or testosterone exposure? Am J Public Health 89:1377-83 |
| Weissman, M M; Warner, V; Wickramaratne, P J et al. (1999) Maternal smoking during pregnancy and psychopathology in offspring followed to adulthood. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 38:892-9 |
