The Potential Negative Impact of Prenatal Nicotine Exposure on the Evoked K-Complex in Infants (2014)

Undergraduates: Erin King, Anna Evans, Alana Campbell

Faculty Advisor: Aysenil Belger
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Previous studies have shown that prenatal nicotine exposure is linked to an increased risk of developing attentional deficiencies such as ADHD (Horst et al., 2012). The auditory evoked K-Complex is a brain electrophysiological response that is analogous to the attention -response during wakefulness, and it can be indicative of the amount of sensory processing that is occurring (Andreassi, 2007). The K-complex can first be seen in infants around 4 months of age (AASM Manual for Scoring Sleep, 2007) and may represent an antecedent to normal attention maturation in children. In this study, a paired-click paradigm was used to elicit auditory K-Complexes during a nap in 3 groups of children: Control infants, infants exposed to environmental tobacco smoke, and infants exposed to nicotine prenatally. . EEG during Stage 2 sleep was analyzed, and amplitude of the K-complex potential was extracted. Results revealed that the amplitude of the prenatal nicotine exposure group appears to be significantly smaller than the amplitude of the potential in the control and environmental tobacco smoke groups. Findings suggest that the K-Complex can represent an early biomarker for attention deficiencies in high-risk infants with exposure to nicotine.