One more Danger why Smoking during Pregnancy is bad (reading)

One more new reason why Smoking during Pregnancy is bad (reading)

We all know smoking during Pregnancy is bad for kids and mother health. But this new research shows how this effect kids study in school.

Smoking Impact on Health

Smoking in pregnancy results in serious risks for both the woman and the fetus. Cigarette smoking by pregnant girls and women has been shown to increase risks of complications in pregnancy and to cause serious adverse fetal outcomes including low birth weight, still births, spontaneous abortions, decreased fetal growth, premature births, placental abruption, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Other reproduction related effects of smoking include lower estrogen levels leading to early menopause and links to infertility.

Quitting smoking during pregnancy has considerable positive health impact for both women and fetuses, and reduces health problems for children born of mothers who smoke.

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Pre- and Postnatal Smoking Issues

How Are Unborn Babies Affected?

• Smoking is known to have an effect on babies before they are born. Nicotine, carbon monoxide and other chemicals in tobacco smoke are passed on to the baby through the placenta.1
• Nicotine increases a baby's heart rate and breathing movements. Some of the chemicals passed on through the mother's blood are known to cause cancer.
• During pregnancy, smokers have a greater risk of miscarriages. During the birth, they are more likely to have complications. The chances of a baby's dying at birth or shortly thereafter are increased if the mother has smoked during pregnancy.
• Babies of women who smoked or were exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke during pregnancy are, on average, smaller at birth than babies of non-smoking mothers. Smoking mothers give birth to infants who weigh about 150 grams less at term than non-smokers.
• Babies born with a lower-than-average birth weight are more likely to get infections and have other health problems.
• A clear relationship exists between the number of cigarettes smoked during pregnancy and a slowdown in the growth of the fetus.  These babies are more prone to perinatal complications, illnesses and death.

Side-effects: Newborns

• Nursing mothers who smoke can pass along harmful chemicals from cigarettes to their babies in breast milk. But it is important to note that a smoker's breast milk is still better than formula, in regards to a baby's development.
• More than 18% of all deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) are due to maternal tobacco use.
• Even in later years, children of mothers who smoked during pregnancy tend to be slightly shorter than other children and have more difficulty with reading, mathematics and related skills.

New research- Smoking during Pregnancy May Lower Your Child's Reading Scores

Babies born to mothers who smoke more than a pack of cigarettes a day while pregnant have lower reading scores and a harder time with reading tests, compared with children whose mothers do not smoke. This is the conclusion of a recent study conducted by researchers at Yale School of Medicine and published in The Journal of Pediatrics. The

reading tests measured how well children read out loud and understood what they were reading. This isn't the first study to suggest that smoking in pregnancy may affect a child's future health and development. A study released in August of this year said that smoking during pregnancy increases a child's risk of asthma. In addition, a 2009 study linked smoking during pregnancy to behavioral problems among 3 and 4 year olds boys.

Jeffrey Gruen, M.D., professor of pediatrics and genetics at Yale and his team examined data from over 5,000 kids enrolled in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), which is an extensive trial of 15,211 kids from the years 1990 to 1992 at the University of Bristol in the U.K.

The experts compared 7 different areas with smoking during pregnancy:

single-word identification

reading speed

spelling

accuracy

reading comprehension

real reading

non-word reading

The researchers adjusted for socioeconomic status, how the mother and child interacted with one another, and 14 other impacting factors.This latest study is another in a line of studies suggesting that giving up smoking could play an important role in your child's future health and wellbeing. Experts discovered through their experiments that the children whose mothers smoked at least one pack a day while pregnant, had reading scores that were 21% lower than the children whose mothers did not smoke while pregnant. The reading tests were given to the kids when they were 7 years old, and again when they were 9.

On average, kids who were born to mothers who smoked during pregnancy were ranked 7 spots lower in terms of reading accuracy and capability to comprehend reading material than their classmates whose mothers did not smoke. Gruen said, "It's not a little difference - it's a big difference in accuracy and comprehension at a critical time when children are being assessed, and are getting a sense of what it means to be successful. “He notes that the impact of smoking during pregnancy is stronger when kids fall short in other phonological areas, such as speech, which indicates a link between smoking and phonological capability.

Gruen continued, the interaction between nicotine exposure and phonology suggests a significant gene-by-environment interaction, making children with an underlying phonological deficit particularly vulnerable.

(Source- The Journal of Pediatrics)