Women who smoke during pregnancy should be aware that they are increasing the odds of baby born with malformations. The study statics show that the risk of having baby with missing or deformed limbs or a cleft lip is higher for smoker by more than twenty-five percent.
In England and Wales seventeen percent of women smoke during pregnancy and those under the age of twenty the figure is forty-five percent. Though most will go on to have a healthy baby, but smoking can cause significant damage to the unborn baby. Together with higher risk of low birth weight and miscarriage, it is another good cause to encourage women to quit.
Each year, in England and Wales about thirty-seven hundred infants in total are born with such conditions. The results from nearly two million cases of malformation and more than eleven million healthy births found that smoking raised the risk of many abnormalities. There are twenty-six percent higher chances of baby born with missing or deformed limbs.
The cases of cleft lip or palate are higher by twenty-eight percent. In the same way, the risk of clubfoot is twenty-eight percent greater and gastrointestinal defects by twenty-seven percent higher. Skull defects are thirty-three percent more likely and eye defects are more common by twenty-five percent.
There is a greatest increase in the risk by up to fifty percent for a condition known as gastroschisis, where parts of the stomach or intestines stick out through the skin. According lead author Prof Allan Hackshaw, they believe many women who smoke while pregnant do not know about these risks.
Hardly any public health educational policies mention birth defects when referring to smoking and those that do are not very precise and this is mainly because of past ambiguity over which ones are directly associated. But now they have this evidence, advice should be more explicit about the kinds of serious defects, sated Prof Hackshaw.
He added that babies of mothers who smoke during pregnancy could suffer from malformations such as deformed limbs and facial and gastrointestinal malformations. This study shows some of the worst outcomes of smoking during pregnancy. Pregnant smokers will be shocked to learn that their nicotine habit could cause eye or limb deformities in their baby, explained Amanda Sandford from Action on Smoking and Health.
There is evidently a need to raise awareness of these risks among girls and to make sure pregnant women are given all the support they need to help them quit smoking and to stay stopped after the birth, added Sandford.