Cigarette Smoking and Pregnancy

This article is discussing the effects of smoking cigarettes during pregnancy as well as while nursing. There is a greater chance of a spontaneous abortion as well as having a reduced birth weight. Other possible problems that can arise are deformed extremities, skull deformation and aortopulmonary septum defects. There is still ongoing debate to whether smoking cigarettes during pregnancy also can cause the child to develope Down syndrome. CO poisoning is one of the problems the fetus will face with a mother who smokes cigarettes, as well as hypoxia followed by carboxyhemoglobinemia. There have been studies done to try to determine if nicotine has any influence of a fetus’s normal growth, but the studies have only been done with animals so the data is inconclusive. Their conclusion is that basically all of the problems that can happen from smoking cigarettes during pregnancy and nursing is from the combustion of the smoke and the CO that is formed. It has been confirmed as well that nicotine can pass through a mothers milk while she is nursing, but as I said before they aren't entirely sure yet what nicotine could do to hinder a Childs normal development. Overall, mothers while pregnant and nursing should avoid cigarettes and any type of smoke that causes combustion so a possible alternative to mothers who can’t get themselves to quit entirely could be to switch to an electronic cigarette. I haven’t been able to find a study that deals with this, but in my opinion since it’s the combustion from a cigarette that is the most harmful, possibly an electronic cigarette could be a safer alternative.

 Clinics of Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Clinical Pharmacology, Erfurt, Germany.

International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics [1999, 37(9):417-427]