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Prenatal Tobacco and Cannabis Exposure: Associations with Cortisol Reactivity in Early School Age Children

  • Special Issue: Salivary Bioscience
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Abstract

Background

The study examined the association between prenatal tobacco or co-exposure to tobacco and cannabis and children’s cortisol reactivity at kindergarten age and the role of child sex, maternal negative mood (depression/perceived stress), and parenting behavior during play interactions as moderators of this association.

Methods

The sample was 238 mother-child dyads (67 tobacco users, 83 co-users of tobacco and cannabis, and 88 non-users). Data used were obtained from pregnancy assessments and six postnatal assessments at 2, 9, 16, 24, and 36 months and kindergarten age. Infant cortisol was measured in response to two laboratory stress paradigms.

Results

Co-exposed children had a significantly greater decrease from pre-stressor to post-stressor and overall lower cortisol response compared with non-exposed children. This association was moderated by maternal harshness during play interactions across early childhood. Co-exposed children had flatter cortisol responses regardless of the mother’s level of harshness or stress/depression. However, non-exposed children who experienced low harshness had the normative cortisol peak 20 min post-stressor, while non-exposed children with high maternal harshness had a flatter cortisol pattern. Similarly, non-exposed children with more depressed/stressed mothers had higher pre-stressor cortisol levels, while those who experienced low maternal depression/stress had lower pre-stressor cortisol but peaked post-stress.

Conclusions

Results suggest that prenatal polysubstance exposure is associated with greater risk for lower cortisol response in children and highlight the role of parenting behavior for non-exposed but not the co-exposed children.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the families who participated in the study and to Research Technicians for data collection and coding. Special thanks goes to Dr. Amol Lele at Women and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo for her collaboration on data collection.

Funding

The study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health under award number R01DA019632 and the Intramural Research Program. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology & Consortium for Combating Substance Abuse, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16870, USA

    Rina D. Eiden

  2. University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Shannon Shisler, Pamela Schuetze & Jaqlyn Colangelo

  3. Institute for Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Douglas A. Granger

  4. Institute on Emerging Health Professions, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Marilyn A. Huestis

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  1. Rina D. Eiden
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rina D. Eiden.

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Conflict of Interest

In the interest of full disclosure, DAG is founder and scientific and strategy advisor at Salimetrics LLC and Salivabio LLC. These relationships are managed by the policies of the committees on conflict of interest at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of California at Irvine.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Eiden, R.D., Shisler, S., Granger, D.A. et al. Prenatal Tobacco and Cannabis Exposure: Associations with Cortisol Reactivity in Early School Age Children. Int.J. Behav. Med. 27, 343–356 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-020-09875-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-020-09875-8

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