Washington, Nov 28: If women don’t want their kids to take up smoking, then they better keep away from cigarettes while expecting, for a new study has found that pregnant smokers can “program” their children to become smokers.
The findings are based on the analysis of over 3,000 mothers and children who were part of a long term pregnancy study in Brisbane, Australia (MUSP) in 1981. Around a third of the women said that they had smoked during their pregnancy.
As a part of the study, the researchers assessed the smoking patterns of liveborn children when they reached the age of 21 in relation to the behavior of their mothers during the pregnancy.
The researchers found that the proportion of the children who took up regular smoking was greater among those whose mothers had smoked during the pregnancy than among those whose mothers had not.
They found that kids whose mothers had smoked while pregnant were almost three times as likely to start smoking regularly at or before they reached the age of 14.
The scientists also found that the children were twice as likely to start smoking after this age as those whose mothers were non-smokers.
Smoking patterns among children whose mothers stopped smoking while pregnant, but then resumed the habit, were similar to those whose mothers had never smoked.
The authors concluded that their findings were yet another reason why pregnant women should be discouraged from smoking during the course of their pregnancy.
The study appears in the journal Tobacco Control. (ANI)