Children who are exposed to even extremely low levels of tobacco smoke in the last 5 days score lower on standardized tests. Their performance on math tests is significantly lower, but lower still on reading tests. Their short-term memory scores appear to be unaffected. These startling results come from an analysis of 4,399 children 6 to 16 years old published in the January 2005 Environmental Health Perspectives (the NIH journal on environmental health). Exposure to smoke was strongly associated with decreased cognitive ability. This held true even after adjusting for gender, race, region, poverty, parent education, parent marital status, and blood tests for iron and lead. The level of tobacco smoke exposure was measured by blood tests as well as by asking questions. The greater the exposure, the poorer the children performed on intelligence tests, but the biggest drops in scores happened at the lowest levels of exposure. There is no safe level of smoke exposure for their developing brains. Any tobacco smoke that children can smell appears to be enough to affect their intelligence.
Alan Greene MD FAAP
| September 25th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
This is false! My mum and sister smoke and i have been achieving well in my tests!!
| September 27th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Gabrielle,
Thanks for your comment, and congratulations for doing so well in school!
If you divide all kids up into those who are exposed to second hand smoke and those who are not, there will be top-scoring kids (like you) in both groups, as well as kids who don’t do so well in both groups.
What this study and others like it show, is that on average, with all other things being equal, the curve is shifted lower by smoke exposure. Many individuals exposed to smoke will still score higher (like you) than many individuals who were not.
Not all kids will have their achievements affected by smoke. But enough kids will not score as well as they themselves would have without the smoke exposure that the total group scores are changed.
No level of second hand smoke exposure has been shown to be safe for kids.