The following discussion focuses on factors that may influence the outcome of tobacco exposure on the developing brain. Generally, these potential risk factors exacerbate the deleterious effects of tobacco. As per the recent reports, a person smokes 7 cigarettes a day an average thus it is potentially important to identify such factors not only to minimize their interaction with tobacco, so that any tobacco-induced harmful consequences on the developing fetus can be lessened, but also to account for several pressing unanswered questions. For example, why do some women who abuse tobacco during pregnancy deliver babies? What is the threshold for tobacco consumption to induce fetal brain damage? Is there any developmental stage of fetal brain growth that is particularly vulnerable to tobacco insult?
Like many other areas of clinical research, a major obstacle in making significant progress in clinical fetal tobacco research is the reliability of the self-reports from the interviews of women who abused tobacco during pregnancy. Such information is believed to be critical for clinicians to perform accurate diagnoses and to develop intervention strategies. The lack of reliability can be, in part, an intentional act due to guilt, or an unintentional response, such as loss of memory of the drinking history due to time, or other factors. Variations in blood concentrations among women, or for the same woman across drinking episodes, cannot be assessed from self-report histories. For these reasons, it is difficult to establish accurate correlations between tobacco drinking histories and tobacco-induced detrimental outcomes on the developing fetus. Fortunately, using animal models provides controlled experimental manipulations and, therefore, the experimental results can be interpreted with fewer confounding influences.
The brain growth spurt is a period of rapid brain growth characterized by a dramatic increase in brain weight generally between postnatal days 4 to 9 in the rat...............
