Secondhand smoke tied to miscarriages, stillbirths
Pregnant women who have been exposed to high levels of secondhand smoke have a higher rate of miscarriages, stillbirths and fetal deaths, a new study suggests.
“We often think of the diseases that secondhand smoke causes as diseases of older people,” epidemiologist Andrew Hyland told Reuters Health. “The results of this study show that secondhand smoke can affect even unborn babies.”
Hyland led the study at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. He and his colleagues found the pregnancy risks associated with women’s secondhand smoke exposure were almost as high as the risks related to their own cigarette smoking.
Secondhand smoke is giving you enough exposure to trigger these bad reproductive effects. If people want to smoke, they should go outdoors, away from other living things.
The study was the first to investigate the effects of secondhand smoke using quantified, lifetime exposure levels. The analysis arms clinicians like Dr. Maurice Druzin, from Stanford University Medical Center in California, with facts to try to persuade expectant fathers and others living with pregnant women to refrain from smoking at home.
This is the first study that shows that secondhand smoke has the same effect as being a primary smoke.
For women who were exposed to the highest lifelong levels of secondhand smoke, the risk of having a stillbirth was even greater – 55 percent higher than among unexposed women.
The researchers defined the highest level of exposure to secondhand smoke as at least 10 years of exposure during childhood, at least 20 years during adulthood and at least 10 years in the workplace.
At that level, a woman’s risk of a tubal ectopic pregnancy was 61 percent higher than among unexposed women, and her risk of a miscarriage was 17 percent higher.
“We’re not talking about an elevated risk of a rare event,” Hyland said of the miscarriage finding. “We’re talking about something that happens all the time.”
Nearly one third of women in the study reported at least one miscarriage, 4.4 percent reported at least one stillbirth and 2.5 percent reported at least one tubal ectopic pregnancy, according to findings published in Tobacco Control.
Ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg attaches outside the uterus, usually in one of the fallopian tubes. Tubal pregnancies are the leading cause of maternal death during the first trimester of pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Researchers cannot draw firm conclusions about cause and effect from observational studies, like the current one. But the study results point to the benefits of minimizing exposure to secondhand smoke, Hyland said.
“There’s a biological plausibility that secondhand smoke could have an impact on these reproductive outcomes not only during the reproductive years but throughout the lifetime of a woman,” he said.
The American Cancer Society estimates that 10 to 15 percent of women smoke during pregnancy and that as many as 5 percent of infant deaths could be prevented if pregnant women did not smoke.
SOURCE:
via Blogger http://bit.ly/1cYPrXT
Recent Comments