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Prenatal nicotine exposure may affect reward processing
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Children whose mothers smoked cigarettes while pregnant had weaker ventral striatum responsivity to reward anticipation, recent study findings published in JAMA Psychiatry indicate.
“This result highlights the need for education and preventive measure to reduce smoking during pregnancy,” researchers wrote.
Previous studies have demonstrated that nicotine exposure during pregnancy has been associated with a threefold to 5.5-fold increased likelihood of nicotine usage in adolescents vs. nonexposed adolescents. Studies also have indicated that prenatal exposure is linked to decreased motivation to natural reinforcement. However, no prior study has investigated the linkage between nicotine exposure and cerebral reward processing, according to the researchers.
They assessed a group of 354 healthy adolescents aged 13 to 15 years who were a subsample of the IMAGEN study; 177 were in the exposed group, whose mothers smoked at least one cigarette per day while pregnant, and 177 were in the nonexposed group. The participants were matched by sex, maternal education level, and imaging site.
Reward response was prompted by a modified monetary incentive delay task and measured by magnetic resonance imaging of the ventral striatum. A weaker response in the ventral striatum during reward anticipation was displayed in prenatally exposed offspring (P<.001) compared with nonexposed offspring. There were no findings in which the nonexposed offspring demonstrated lower brain responsivity. Whether the adolescents currently smoked was included in the analysis.
“Future analyses of these data will provide a great opportunity to assess whether prenatally exposed adolescents develop an increased risk for substance use and addiction and which role the reported neuronal differences during reward anticipation plays in this development,” the researchers wrote.
Disclosure: See the study for a full list of financial disclosures.