The Cigarette Smoke Effects on Children
The side effects from second-hand smoke can still be serious even if smokers think that they are careful. The cigarette smoke remains on clothing, in hair, and even on smokers’ skin. There is no way to absolutely avoid cigarette smoke from remaining on smoker if he/she smoke.
Cigarette smoke is very detrimental for children’s health too. For example scientists showed in a recent study that kids of women who smoke during pregnancy can develop hearing-related cognitive deficiency.
For the first time, researchers believe that they have enough evidences that not only involve nicotine as the offender, but also showed what the substance can attack the brain to cause these deficits.
Raju Metherate, associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, and his colleagues from UC Irvine, showed that nicotine exposure during the equivalent of a human’s third trimester led to hearing-related cognitive problems.
For the first time scientists have proved this causal link in a recent study using rats. Further tests then revealed that the possible cause of the deficits was damaged to the receptors in the brain that are sensitive to nicotine, which seems to occur when humans or animals are exposed to the substance during growth.
But children with auditory processing deficits can have a number of hearing-related problems when are exposed to cigarette smoke. They also may have controversy understanding speech in a noisy environment, not understand information that is presented verbally, and may not be able to tell the difference between similar sounds.
This is an important study only because it shows exactly what aspects of smoking are very harmful especially in pregnancy when it comes to cognitive hearing deficits.
It is not so easy to quit smoking, and even most women who smoke find it difficult to quit during pregnancy. For them, doctors often recommend a nicotine patch. While that does protect the fetus from the well-known physical under-development related to harmful chemicals in cigarette smoke, exposure to nicotine appears to be enough to cause serious problems on its own, especially in terms of brain development.
Metherate explained: “While verbal function cannot be measured in an animal, this creation of a causal relationship between prenatal nicotine exposure and auditory-cognitive deficits is an important step forward in reinforcing these previous findings in humans”.
The researchers also found that in this study, nicotine appeared to enhance auditory function in the adult rats, but only if they had not been exposed to the substance during development.
Researchers placed electrodes in the animals’ auditory cortex, then exposed them to different frequencies of sound. At the end of the investigation they found that nicotine made the cortex much more responsive to sound if the rats had not had exposure to nicotine during their early development.
Researchers concluded that cigarette smoking effect on children is very dangerous because at a very young age, they are still in the developing age and also their breathing rate is faster than the adults.
