15.11.10
Pregnancy smoking connected to repeat offenders, says BMA
Experts have found a link between smoking during pregnancy and the rates of repeat offending in those babies once they grow up into adults.
The results were announced in a report in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health and were based on a study of 4000 individuals.
The report’s authors: “While we cannot definitively conclude that maternal smoking during pregnancy (particularly heavy smoking) is a causal risk factor for adult criminal offending, the current findings do support a modest causal relationship.”
Researchers say that this may be connected to the effect nicotine has on the neurobehavioural pathways of the developing brain.
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