A new Dutch report says that pregnant women who smoke can cause permanent damage to their child's circulatory system,
increasing risks for heart disease and stroke later in life.
Yikes! This is in addition to what we already knew about risks of
compromised intrauterine growth and low birth weight. 732 people born between 1970 and 1973 were studied, and it was found that at
the age of 30, the adult children of the 215
mothers who smoked during their pregnancy had thicker walls of the
carotid arteries in the neck (an early sign of atherosclerosis)
compared with adult children whose mothers didn't smoke. What
about the fathers? Turns out, their smoking has an effect as
well: if both parents smoked during
pregnancy, by age 30, their children had thicker artery walls
than people with one smoking parent or parents who did not smoke.
Which certainly reinforces the notion that secondhand smoke is harmful.
The moral here: Please, for your kids, don't smoke around them, both in and out of the womb (the patch may be an alternative).
