A mother who smokes during pregnancy can harm the lungs of her unborn child, reports a study in the October 19 issue of The Lancet . In the past, some experts - including those of the tobacco industry - had challenged the studies linking lung problems of children with maternal smoking habits. But pediatric researchers say that this report confirms the effect.
The new discovery comes from a group led by Mr. S. Stick Princess Margaret Hospital for Children in Perth, Australia. He and his colleagues undertook to measure lung function in infants during the first hours of life outside the womb. By testing the children immediately after birth, they hoped to respond to critics who say that postnatal exposure to smoke or infectious agents - not lung function itself - was the cause of wheezing in infants and other lung problems. A key innovation in this study was the use of the stick of a high-tech device for measuring the volume of breathing - a plethysmograph, worn like a belt around the chest. It avoids the need for a mask, which often requires sedation and can impair breathing.
Stick and his team examined 461 children born to mothers enrolled in a large study of pregnancy. They also asked the mothers how much they smoked and checked their blood for cotinine, a metabolite of tobacco smoke. They found that a pattern of distinctive shallow breathing in infants has been linked independently to three risk factors: If their mothers had hypertension, had a family history of asthma or smoked at least 10 cigarettes a day . Because older children with obstructive pulmonary disease showed a similar breath, stick theorized that infants had developed lungs hurt.
`` The picture is very clear, '' says pediatric pulmonologist Fernando Martinez of the University of Arizona, Tucson. `` Smoking is not only bad for mothers who smoke during pregnancy, but it is also very bad for children. This is something ... the tobacco industry can not argue against. ''
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