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Objective: It is encouraging that approximately 25-40% of pregnant women who smoked prior to pregnancy tend to quit smoking by the first visit. The purpose of this article is to evaluate decision-making, executive functions and impulsivity in pregnant women who cannot stop smoking and compare them with non-smokers. We expected diminished executive functions and decision-making and increased impulsivity in smokers relative to controls.
Methods: Twenty-four pregnant who continue to smoke and 15 pregnant who never smoked completed psychometric cognitive tests and psychiatric rating scales. Decision-making and impulsivity were evaluated respectively with Iowa Gambling Test and Barratt Impulsivity Scale. Executive functions included Stroop Test and Tower of London (ToL) Test. Physical addiction to nicotine was assessed with Fagerstrom Test in the smoker group. Exclusion criteria for all groups were prior diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, age less than 18 years.
Results: The Mann-Whitney U test is used to compare the groups. There were no differences between decision-making, impulsivity and Stroop scores. The pregnant women who had never smoked showed better performance on ToL.
Conclusion: The Tower of London is a task used in the assessment of executive functioning specifically to detect deficits in planning. Performance on the ToL has been shown to be impaired in dependency. We did not determine differences between decision making, impulsivity and Stroop performance in the groups. Our results of decision making, impulsivity and Stroop performance were not consistent with the literature. This can be related to the sample size. It has been stated that impulsivity is a structural risk factor for addiction and decision-making was affected in alcohol and substance addicts.