Approximately 10% of women use cocaine and 20% smoke cigarettes during pregnancy. Animal studies indicate that both cocaine and nicotine are neuroteratogenic agents, although findings with humans are inconsistent. Studies with human infants have been plagued by unreliable subject identification procedures, poor control over confounding factors, and invalid measures of CNS integrity. The literature on prenatal cocaine and nicotine use is reviewed and two studies are presented along with an intriguing case report. The effects of maternal prenatal cocaine use (Study 1) and two levels of cigarette smoking (Study 2) on newborn information processing ability were examined using an auditory habituation-recovery paradigm. Case-control designs were employed in which subjects were individually matched on a number of maternal and infant factors. Cocaine exposure was determined by newborn meconium analysis, urine analysis, and maternal self-report. Maternal smoking was determined by self-report and a variation of the bogus pipeline method. Fetal cocaine- and nicotine-exposure were associated with differential impairments in neonatal information processing. Cocaine-exposed newborns exhibited deficits on measures of habituation and recovery to novelty. Dose-response effects of nicotine-exposure were evident on measures of orientation and habituation, but recovery to novelty was not consistently affected. The results imply that fetal cocaine-exposure severely impairs neonatal auditory information processing ability, whereas fetal tobacco-exposure is associated with deficits in information-processing which may be secondary to impairments in arousal regulation. These auditory processing deficits may be related to the later language impairments reported in follow-up studies with cocaine-and tobacco-exposed infants. Following the two studies, a case is presented of an infant born to a woman who reported using large amounts of cocaine throughout pregnancy, although the infant's meco
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.42119 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Potter, Susan M. |
| Contributors | Zelazo, P. R. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001555322, proquestno: NQ30361, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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