Smoking During Pregnancy Can Lead to Heart Defects

Smoking during pregnancy has long been identified as a health risk for the many serious side effects it can cause to both mother and baby. But a new study by the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is shedding more light on why it is critical for women to quit smoking as soon as possible after learning of pregnancy, or ideally, before the baby is even conceived.

According to the study, the babies of women who smoke in their first trimester have a greater risk of being born with congenital heart defects – to be precise, the risk is 20 to 70 percent greater than for babies of women who don’t smoke during that time.

The specific heart defects smoking has been linked to are those that cause an obstruction of blood flow from the right side of the heart to the lungs, as well as those that obstruct the openings between the heart’s upper chambers.

The study was conducted on Baltimore-Washington infants, and encompassed data from 2,525 babies with congenital heart defects and 3,435 healthy babies, born from 1981 to 1989. The full version, entitled Maternal Smoking and Congenital Heart Defects in the Baltimore-Washington Infant Study, has been published in the American Academy of Pediatrics journal, Pediatrics.

Along with congenital heart defects, smoking during pregnancy has also been strongly linked to low birth weight, premature births, SIDS and even stillbirths.

According to CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden, the results of this study and numerous others show that quitting smoking is imperative for women who are pregnant or are thinking of becoming pregnant.

“Women who smoke and are thinking about becoming pregnant need to quit smoking, and if they`re already pregnant, they need to stop,” he stated. “Quitting is the single most important thing a woman can do to improve her health as well as the health of her baby.”