Mother’s Smoking Status during Pregnancy on Child’s Motor Development

Abstract

PURPOSE: To determinate the impact of a mother’s smoking status during pregnancy on a child’s motor development using a propensity score (PS) analysis, a statistical method for evaluating treatment effects when using nonexperimental or observational data. METHODS: Five NHANES National Youth Fitness Survey 2012 data sets, “Demographic Variables,” “Physical Functioning,” “Early Childhood,” in which mother’s smoking status during pregnancy was asked, “Physical Activity,” and “Test of Gross Motor Development (TGMD-2)”were merged. By matching 10 variables, including “Sex of the child,” “At least one adult aged 60 years or older living in the participant’s household,” “the household reference person’s sex,” “Weight at birth, pounds,” “Your child was overweight,” “Crawl, walk, run, play limitations,” “Impairment requiring special equipment,” “Receive Special Ed or Early Intervention,” “Days physically activity least 60 min,” and “Hours watch TV or video past 30 days,” a regression model was employed for the PS analysis (with inverse probability weighting adjustment and greedy algorithms with 1:1 matching; the covariate adjustment were used to estimate the effect of “Did biological mother smoke at any time while she was pregnant” on a child’s gross motor development). The full sample weights were used for the analysis. RESULTS: The negative impacts of a mother smoking while pregnant on their child’s motor development, with and without the PS analysis, are summarized below:Table: No title available.CONCLUSION: By applying the PS analysis, the negative impact of mothers smoking status during pregnancy on children’s gross motor development was further confirmed.