#cotinine

Maternal smoking during pregnancy increases risk of ADHD among offspring up to 3-fold

The higher the cotinine levels were in the mother’s blood during pregnancy, the greater was the child’s risk of developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) later in life, showed an epidemiological study conducted by the Research Centre for Child Psychiatry at the University of Turku in Finland. Globally, it is the first study in which the connection between fetal nicotine exposure and diagnosis of ADHD was shown by measuring cotinine levels from pregnant maternal serum specimens.