Smoking an established Risk Factor for Death in Infancy
As it is known smoking is very dangerous for pregnant women. A recent study found that poor women are more likely to smoke while pregnant and this explain some, but not all, of their greater risk of having a stillborn infant.
As it is known nicotine is a very addictive substance and it’s very difficult to stop smoking at any time, especially during pregnancy. Clearly people need a lot of help to do this.
Dr. Ron Gray of the University of Oxford said: “The findings are encouraging, in a way, because they suggest that helping women quit could help eliminate social and economic disparities in stillbirth and infant death.”
Stillbirths and infant deaths are evidently linked to deprivation and poverty too, added researchers.
Since socioeconomic class is known to play a role in whether or not a woman smokes in pregnancy, the researchers look for to quantify the relationship by analyzing records on babies born in Scottish hospitals between 1994 and 2003. Their analysis included 529,317 babies born alive and 2,699 stillbirths at 24 to 44 weeks’ pregnancy.
Thirty-eight percent of the women living in the most deprived neighborhoods confessed to smoking while they were pregnant compared to 13 percent of the women living in the least deprived neighborhoods.
Researchers explained that women in the study were only asked whether or not they smoked at a single time point.
Dr. Ron Gray added: “But babies exposed to smoke in the womb may be more likely to be exposed in the first year of life as well. Smoking is an established risk factor for death in infancy, especially sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).”
At the end of the investigation, researchers found that stillbirths were 56 percent more common among the most deprived women, and these women were 72 percent more likely to have babies who died in the first year of life.
A really impressionable finding is that the probability of having a baby dies after 28 days of age but before one year was a two-and-a-half time more common among the most deprived mothers compared to the least deprived mothers.
Investigators concluded that smoking in pregnancy was really responsible for 38 percent of the difference in stillbirths and 31 percent of the difference in infant deaths.
They also think that not only smoking is the main cause of infant deaths. They think that there are other issues as well, such as tackling family and child poverty, improving access to health and maternity care for low income women, and … things in general to improve deprivation such as neighborhood renewal schemes.
