Female smokers who discover they are pregnant can protect their children against the harmful effects of smoking by stopping as soon as they find out, new research has suggested.
A British study of more than 50,000 pregnancies has found that children born to smokers who stop immediately when a pregnancy is confirmed appear to be as healthy as those born to women who have never smoked.
The findings, from a team led by Professor Nick Macklon, of the University of Southampton, will reassure many smokers who become pregnant unexpectedly and worry that the cigarettes they smoked before they found out might have had lasting effects on their children.
The research also highlights the importance of giving up smoking in pregnancy as soon as is possible, as even once a pregnancy has begun it is not too late to avoid its harmful effects. “We can now give couples hard evidence that making the effort to stop smoking in the periconceptional period [immediately before and after getting pregnant] will be beneficial for their baby.”
In the study, which was presented today at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Stockholm, Professor Macklon’s team studied all the pregnancies registered at the Southampton University Medical Centre between 2002 and 2010. Birth outcomes were compared for women who had never smoked, those who had given up at least a year before conceiving, those who gave up less than a year before conceiving, those who gave up only on discovering they were pregnant, and those who continued to smoke.
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The study found that while smokers’ babies had a significantly lower birthweight, the women who had given up on discovering they were pregnant had babies of similar weight to the never-smokers.
“Not only was birthweight much better in this group than it was in the groups where the mothers had continued to smoke, but we also found that the babies reached the same gestational age and head circumference as those born to women who had never smoked,” Professor Macklon said.