Maternal Smoking Linked to Childhood Wheezing and Asthma

As if expecting mothers didn't already have enough reason not to smoke, emerging evidence demonstrates that women who smoke, even if they don't begin to smoke until late in the third trimester, put their kids at higher risk of developing asthma as early as pre-school.

Researchers at the Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm carried out a pooled analysis of eight birth cohorts included data on over 21,000 children and involved 735 children exposed to maternal smoking only during pregnancy.

They were able to determine that such exposure raised the risk factor for these kids of suffering from childhood wheezing and asthma by the time they reached pre-school.

They also determined that the likelihood of these health problems increased "in a significant dose-response pattern in relation to maternal cigarette consumption during the first trimester."

The study appeared in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, a journal of the American Thoracic Society.

It should be noted that this study looked only at wheezing and asthma in kids born to women who smoked during pregnancy. Additional health risks strongly linked to maternal smoking include stillbirth, premature birth, low birth weight, obesity in childhood, high blood pressure, and sudden infant death syndrome.

Source: Medical News Today