ten percent of women who smoked right through pregnancy had premature babies

Another survey has shown clearly that women who quit smoking early in pregnancy significantly reduce the dangers of health complications to their unborn child. Smoking during pregnancy has been shown to increase the rates of premature births and underweight babies as well as a whole list of other problems.

Dr. Laura Polakowski from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in America explained that she and her colleagues had discovered that women who quit in the first three months of pregnancy had an almost identical risk of having premature or 'Small for Gestational Age' (SGA) babies when compared to women who had never smoked. Those women who quit in the second three months of pregnancy had a slightly higher risk but lower than those who did not quit at all.

Dr. Polakowski's research was made possible by birth certificates which came into use in some American states in 2003 which recorded information as to whether the mothers smoked during each trimester of pregnancy. In all the researchers were able to look at the data of over 900,000 birth certificates from children born in eleven American states in 2005. The data collected showed that ten percent of women who smoked right through pregnancy had premature babies and that a further fifteen percent had babies which were SGA. One smoking woman in 50 gave birth to both SGA and premature babies.

For those women who quit smoking in the first three months of pregnancy the risk of giving birth to a premature baby was reduced by 31 percent and the risk of giving birth to an SGA baby at full-term was reduced by 55 percent. The risk of both of these things happening was reduced by 53 percent according to their analysis. The researchers said that they hoped that their study would prevent women from thinking that smoking was not particularly eventful on the outcome of pregnancies and that it would be used as an incentive to women to quit smoking when pregnant.

The research was written up in the medical journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.