Smoking in Pregnancy Facts

The Facts about Smoking in Pregnancy

Everyone knows that smoking is harmful for you but a lot of people don’t know the full range of reasons why smoking can harm you, your baby and your children. Women are particularly concerned to learn that the harm can continue throughout the child's life even into adulthood.

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Every time you inhale cigarette smoke you introduce over 4000 toxic chemicals, including the addictive substance nicotine into your body. When you are pregnant your baby gets a relatively higher dose of these chemicals too, via the placenta.

Smoking cigarettes damages blood vessels, that's why smoking can cause heart attacks, strokes and gangrene. Unfortunately, smoking is particularly harmful to the blood vessels of the placenta. The more cigarettes and the longer you smoke, the more serious the damage to the placenta. Ultimately, your baby starves for food and oxygen. That's why smokers babies are often small, and stressed. When your baby is born the placenta will show the effect of smoking, being pale and gritty with smoking related damage.

The consequence of being born small and stressed is that your child will suffer a much greater risk of developing childhood obesity in later life. Scientists are still uncertain why small scrawny babies tend to develop obesity later in life, but this relationship has been demonstrated in large studies, both in Australia and Europe. Mums may smoke to stay thin, but it will make it more likely that their child will be overweight or obese.

Another consequence of starving for nutrition through a damaged placenta is that the babies of smokers tend to have lungs that develop prematurely. This response of a stressed baby may be in preparation for a premature birth. The long-term consequence is that babies of smoking mothers risk a lifelong increased chance of developing asthma and emphysema.

Damage to the placenta, can even cause a placental abruption, which means that the placenta becomes detached from the wall of the womb. This can cause the death of the baby and can be a very serious risk for the mother is well. In fact, it is estimated that smoking is responsible for around 10% of all perinatal infant deaths.

Another concern is the exposure of your growing baby's brain to the highly addictive chemical nicotine. This concern is probably greatest in the later parts of your pregnancy when the baby's brain is growing the fastest. Scientists have noticed that smoking during pregnancy seems to be linked with attention deficit disorder and other learning and behaviour problems of the child later in life. It has still not been proved that nicotine causes, attention deficit disorder. There may be some other factor linked with smoking, that increases the risk of attention deficit disorder. But until the research is complete it would be best to avoid exposing your baby's brain to nicotine especially in the later part of pregnancy.

Grisly irritable babies can put enormous stress on new mothers. Think how much more settled your baby will be if he or she will not have to withdraw from nicotine for the first few weeks of its life.

Babies exposed to smoking during pregnancy have an increased risk of cot death. Nicotine type receptors are involved in prompting your baby to breath. It may be a problem with these receptors, or the general stress of being undernourished that causes the increased risk of sudden infant death or cot death.

You may have heard that smoking reduces your fertility. A recent study found that smoking seems to kill male embryos more than female embryos. Smokers are probably more likely to have a female child. Click here to listen to a podcast on this study.

Effect of your smoking on your children after birth...

Children’s airways are smaller, their lungs are more delicate and their immune systems are less well developed, they are extremely susceptible to the dangers of tobacco smoke exposure.

Parental smoking is associated with increased risk of;

Worsening of asthma
Respiratory tract infections (e.g. croup, bronchiolitis, pneumonia)
Coughing and wheezing
Glue ear: the leading cause of hearing problems in children
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)
Eye and throat irritations
Meningococcal disease

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