Smoking during pregnancy is never a good idea, but new research shows it might double the risk of a baby dying from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
"Any maternal smoking during pregnancy -- even just one cigarette a day -- doubles the risk of sudden unexpected infant death [SUID, another term for unexplained infant deaths]," said lead researcher Tatiana Anderson. She is a fellow at Seattle Children's Research Institute, Center for Integrative Brain Research.
Doctors should strongly encourage women to give up smoking during pregnancy, or if they can't quit, to smoke less, she said. Each cigarette smoked increases the risk of SIDS, Anderson added.
If women didn't smoke during pregnancy, the rate of SIDS in the United States could be cut by 22 percent, preventing some 800 infant deaths a year, according to the new report
ed online March 11 in the journal Pediatrics.
Although 55 percent of the women in the study who smoked didn't stop or cut back during pregnancy, those who did markedly reduced the risk of SIDS, Anderson said.
Specifically, women who cut down on their smoking by the third trimester reduced the risk of SIDS by 12 percent. Women who quit by the third trimester reduced the risk by 23 percent, the researchers found.
For the study, Anderson and her colleagues collected data on more than 19,000 SUID cases. SUID cases include sudden infant death syndrome and other unknown causes of death, as well as suffocation and strangulation in bed of infants under age 1.
It's not just smoking, said Dr. Rahul Gupta, chief medical and health officer at the March of Dimes. But the more women smoke, the greater the risk for SUID becomes, he said.
Women should stop smoking before pregnancy and certainly during pregnancy, Gupta advised.
Smoking during pregnancy can impair the baby's brain development. In addition, women who smoke are depriving their baby of oxygen, as smoking decreases the amount of oxygen in the blood and, therefore, in the placenta, he explained.
"Smoking also causes preterm birth, decreases in development of the brain and respiratory system of the baby," Gupta said. "Nicotine has also been linked with an important part of the development of the brainstem in the infant."
Gupta explained that if an infant stops breathing during sleep, a mechanism in the brain senses the lack of oxygen and triggers breathing to start. This is called auto-resuscitation.
Nicotine, however, alters this response, he said. "That baby may not be able to auto-resuscitate, and as a result, we end up with sudden infant death syndrome," Gupta said.
Because e-cigarettes are a nicotine delivery device, they are not a safe alternative to cigarettes, he added.
"Nicotine is in the vaping device, so all the impacts we are talking about are still harmful when nicotine is delivered, regardless of the device," Gupta said. "Nicotine and babies do not match."
In addition, flavorings and other ingredients in e-cigarettes may be harmful to developing babies, he noted.
"Quitting smoking is one of the most effective actions you can take to protect yourself and your baby," Gupta said.
Adult survivors of childhood brain tumors often face intellectual and financial struggles, a new study finds.
ReplyDeleteAdvances in treatment have prolonged the lives of many childhood brain tumor patients, but survivors may have to contend with a number of effects from the disease and its treatment, the researchers noted.
To learn more, they compared 181 American and Canadian survivors of low-grade glioma brain tumors in childhood with 105 siblings of survivors.
"Late effects in adulthood are evident even for children with the least malignant types of brain tumors who were treated with the least toxic therapies available at the time," said study author M. Douglas Ris, from Baylor College of Medicine and its affiliate Texas Children's Hospital, in Houston.
The survivors were a median age of 8 years at the time of diagnosis and a median age of 40 at the time of the study.
The survivors and siblings underwent a number of cognitive (thinking/memory) tests, as well as socioeconomic assessments.
Overall, survivors treated with surgery plus radiotherapy had lower estimated IQ scores than survivors treated with surgery only, who had lower scores than siblings.
Survivors diagnosed at younger ages had low scores on most of the cognitive tests. Survivors -- especially those treated with surgery plus radiotherapy -- had lower levels of education, lower incomes and lower-level jobs than siblings.
While the researchers only found an association, they said the findings suggest that measures such as cognitive therapies and educational/occupational services may be needed to help ease the long-term effects of treatment in childhood brain tumor survivors. The study was published online June 24 in the journal Cancer.
"As pediatric brain tumors become more survivable with continued advances in treatments, we need to improve surveillance of these populations so that survivors continue to receive the best interventions during their transition to adulthood and well beyond," Ris said in a journal news release.
The research was done in conjunction with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.