Smoking while pregnant harms baby’s blood vessels

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women who smoke during pregnancy may cause permanent blood vessel damage in their children that may become evident as early as young adulthood and raise the risk for heart attack and stroke, Dutch investigators reported today.

The study involved 732 young adults, born between 1970 and 1973, who were evaluated at around 30 years of age. Compared with young adults of mothers who did not smoke during pregnancy, young adults of mothers who did light up during pregnancy had much thicker walls of the carotid arteries in the neck that supply blood to the brain.

Even if the mothers did not smoke during pregnancy, having a father who smoked during gestation was also associated with thicker neck or “carotid” arteries. The association was strongest when both parents smoked during pregnancy.

Dr. Cuno S. P. M. Uiterwaal, from University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands, and colleagues also found that young adults of mothers who smoked were more likely to smoke themselves, and these subjects had the greatest increase in carotid artery thickness compared with nonsmokers who were not exposed in the womb to tobacco.

“The interaction between participant’s current smoking behavior and maternal smoking during pregnancy could indicate that if the cardiovascular system is exposed to tobacco smoke in utero, the vessels are more vulnerable to tobacco smoke later in life.”

On the other hand, current smoking by women who abstained during pregnancy had no effect on the thickness of their children’s neck arteries.

“Our findings were largely independent of other cardiovascular disease risk factors,” the Uiterwaal and colleagues point out, lending plausibility to the notion of deleterious vascular effects from gestational exposure to tobacco smoke.

SOURCE: Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, December 2008.

Source

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Posts:


NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Fathers-to-be who smoke and want to protect the health of their families should take it outside, suggests new research from Korea. Newborns whose fathers had smoked in the home had higher levels of nicotine in their hair than babies born to non-smoking dads, Dr. Moon-Woo Seong of the National Center in

Full Post: Dad’s in-home smoking may harm family’s health
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Women who breathed in secondhand smoke as children or young adults were later more likely to have trouble getting pregnant and suffer more miscarriages than women not exposed to smoke, U.S. researchers reported Thursday. They said toxins in the smoke could have permanently damaged the women’s bodies, causing the later problems, and said

Full Post: Secondhand smoke causes fertility problems: study
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Amy Norton NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older adults who smoke may face an elevated risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests. In an analysis of two dozen previous studies, UK researchers found that older adults who currently smoked were at greater risk of Alzheimer’s than were non-smokers. When the results of the studies

Full Post: Alzheimer’s risk upped in senior smokers
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An obese child’s arteries may be just as clogged as the arteries of someone who is middle-aged, researchers said on Tuesday. This buildup of fatty plaque means the children may risk heart attack or stroke as early as age 30, according to Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of the University of Missouri Kansas

Full Post: Obese kids’ arteries look like middle-aged adults’
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women who have ever been around smokers regularly may have more difficulty getting pregnant than those who have not, a new study suggests. The findings, researchers say, offer one more reason for women to kick the smoking habit. Studies have found that women who smoke raise their risk of a number

Full Post: Second-hand smoke tied to fertility problems

Site Navigation

Most Read

Search

Contact

  • kinwrite.com@gmail.com