Pregnant women who live or work with smokers face a higher risk of giving birth to a stillborn baby, having a child with low birth weight or with a smaller head, according to a Canadian study.
It is considered that passive smoking exposes people to about 1% of smokers who inhale toxic assets, and the study adds further evidence that this secondhand smoke can harm an unborn baby.
“This information is important for women, their families and healthcare providers,” wrote Joan Crane, of Eastern Health in St. John’s, Canada, and BJOB: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. “The smoke emitted from the burning cigarette contains many harmful chemicals and in higher concentration than the smoke inhaled through a filter,” said the expert.
Crane and his colleagues indicated that these toxic harm to the fetus in several ways: for example, restricting blood flow and possibly damaging the placenta.
Through a database of pregnant women in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, the team observed the rate of stillbirth deliveries as well as other results during the birth, such as fetal head circumference, which has been linked with delayed intellectual development in children.
Of the nearly 12,000 women in the database, 11% said they had been exposed to secondhand smoke. The birth rate of stillbirth in which the fetus dies during the third trimester of pregnancy, was 0.83% in passive smokers, compared with 0.37% in women who did not breathe smoke snuff.
This does not prove that the smoke itself is the culprit. Even when the researchers took into account other risk factors, including maternal age and alcohol consumption patterns and drug-passive smokers were still three times more likely to give birth to a stillborn child. In other words, if the poison is thus the culprit, he would die a baby in the womb of every 117 women exposed to passive smoking.
“This is huge,” said Hamisu Salihu, an expert on stillbirths of the University of South Florida in Tampa. Can now be added “to inform patients that secondhand smoke can lose your baby.” That relationship was not conclusively established until now, concluded the expert, who did not participate in the study.
Canadian researchers also found that babies born to passive smokers spend about 54 grams less than those whose mothers lived and worked in places “smoke-free.” Also, their heads were slightly smaller, with an average of 0.24 inches shorter.
Globally, the most common causes of infant death are birth complications during childbirth, infections during pregnancy such as syphilis, maternal health problems like hypertension or diabetes, fetal growth retardation, by which infants not grow at the appropriate rate, and birth defects.
