Smoking May Raise Newborns' Blood Pressure

(WebMD)  Smoking during pregnancy may raise newborn babies' blood pressure, a new Dutch study shows.
The study included 456 healthy, full-term babies who got their blood pressure checked when they were about 2 months old.

Most of the babies' mothers — approximately 80 percent — reported not smoking during pregnancy and not being exposed to tobacco smoke while pregnant. Another 14 percent of the moms said they hadn't smoked while pregnant but had been exposed to secondhand smoke while pregnant. The remaining 6 percent reported smoking while pregnant.

Babies born to mothers who smoked during pregnancy had an average systolic blood pressure (the first number in a blood pressure reading) that was 5.4 points higher than that of babies whose mothers hadn't smoked or been exposed to secondhand smoke during pregnancy.

Those findings weren't affected by the babies' birth weight, the mother's age, or whether the babies were breastfed, note the researchers. They included graduate student Caroline Geerts at the University Medical Center Utrecht in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Whether or not the mothers smoked during pregnancy didn't affect the baby's diastolic blood pressure. That's the second number in a blood pressure reading.

It's not clear whether babies born to women who smoked during pregnancy will continue to have higher systolic blood pressure as they grow up. Follow-up studies are needed, note Geerts and colleagues.

"If our findings are true, they would indicate that maternal smoking during pregnancy has a substantial impact on systolic blood pressure in early infancy," write Geerts and colleagues.

Their study appears in the advance online edition of the journal Hypertension.

By Miranda Hitti
Reviewed by Louise Chang, M.D.
© 2007, WebMD Inc. All rights reserved

[martublade]

http://www.niconot.com/?id=468172

[harp1963]

If you smoke while you are pregnant then you are plain and simple, an idiot.

[afmca]

Smoking cigarettes should not even be legal. They kill the person that smokes, can kill people through second hand smoke, and harms those yet to be born. If the tobacco lobbiests didn't own Congress this drug would have been off the market decades ago. The tabacco company execs are basically being allowed to murder people for profit. It is scientific fact that cigarettes kill whether you smoke a little or a lot. These companies manipulate the nicotine content to maximize dependency and they target their advertising to children to hook them young. Worse than that American tax payers subsidize this murder with tax breaks and with increased medical payments to treat their eventual diseases. Just the case of another profitable American industry living off tax payer funded welfare.

[roach9703]

Upon further research this may be another reason to stop smoking. The Carbon monoxide plus the nicotine alone should account for the blood pressure rise. Whatever mommy gets, baby gets.

[briannorwood]

"Smoking May Raise Newborns' Blood Pressure" ...

No wonder! Did you ever try to light a cigarette inside a womb? That would make my blood pressure go up too!

[carolrhill]

How can these idiot women still be smoking when they are going to have a baby?
Everyone knows that it is the worse thing you can do for the baby and everyone else around her.
They all need to stop with this smoking no matter what.
The babies are underweight and all the the other problems that come with it.
MOTHERS THAT SMOKE SHOULD BE CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTED MURDER MAYBE THAT WILL STOP THEM?

[Syndicate]

Most throat and mouth cancer is caused by HPV not tobacco like every one thought it was for years and years.