Maternal Depression and Cognitive Features of 9-Year-Old Children Prenatally-Exposed to Cocaine

Abstract

This study evaluated cocaine exposure and maternal characteristics as competing predictors of school-age cognitive, achievement, and language performance. One group of 47 exposed 9-year-old children were first studied in an earlier prenatal study. A non-exposed contrast group (n = 46) served as a reference. Maternal measures included: IQ, psychopathology, drugs, demographics, and environment. Child intelligence, language, and achievement scores were inversely related to maternal IQ and depression scores, with cocaine exposure significant secondary or tertiary predictors for many children. Verbal IQ scores of exposed children strongly reflected maternal depression (r = .54) but no such relationship was found among the non-exposed cohort (r = .00).

Keywords:

• Children
• cocaine
• cognitive
• maternal depression

Notes

This work supported by Research Grants H324C980092 from the U.S. Department of Education and R01-DA06379 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.