Every year, a large number of children are exposed to smoking during pregnancy which increases the risk of decreased birth weight, fetal morbidity and behavioral abnormalities. Therefore, nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) is often considered as a treatment option. Despite a large number of epidemiological studies, there are conflicting reports about the long-term consequences of maternal smoki...

BACKGROUND Smoking during pregnancy has been shown to increase the risks of several adverse birth outcomes. Associations with overweight and/or obesity in the offspring have also been suggested. We aim to investigate whether familial factors confound the association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and overweight in early adulthood in young Swedish males born 1983-88. METHODS In a po...

BACKGROUND Maternal smoking has been associated with elevated risk of type 2 diabetes among the offspring in adulthood. The mechanisms underlying this fetal "programming" effect remain unclear. The present study sought to explore whether maternal smoking affects metabolic health biomarkers in fetuses/newborns. METHODS In a prospective singleton pregnancy cohort (n = 248), we compared metaboli...

Maternal smoking during pregnancy has been consistently associated with aggressive behaviors among offspring across the life course. We posit that anger, as a precedent of aggression, may have mediated the association. The current study examines the relation between maternal smoking during pregnancy and anger proneness among the adult offspring. Participants were 611 adult offspring (ages 38-48...

This study examined the impact of infant and maternal factors on preterm delivery and low birthweight (LBW) in Alberta between January 1, 1994 and December 31, 1996. Data on 113,994 births were collected from vital statistics registration birth data. Logistic regression models for preterm and LBW delivery suggested the key risk factors were multiple and still birth (odds ratios > 22.0). Other c...

This systematic review aimed to investigate the association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and birth defects in children. We performed an electronic search of observational studies in the databases ovid MEDLINE (1950 to April 2010), LILACS and SciELO. We included 188 studies with a total of 13,564,914 participants (192,655 cases). Significant positive associations were found between ...

BACKGROUND Maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with offspring obesity. However, little is known about whether maternal smoking in pregnancy predicts other offspring cardiovascular risk factors including waist circumference (WC), waist-hip-ratio (WHR), pulse rate (PR), systolic (SBP), and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). METHODS We studied a sub-sample of 2038 (50% males) young adul...

BACKGROUND The aim of the present cross-sectional study was to use objective methods to assess the association between maternal smoking and body composition in offspring. METHODS A total of 2508 grade 4 school children were enrolled; all underwent lifestyle disease and passive smoking screening. Children were classified into four groups according to their urinary cotinine level and maternal s...

This study in Egypt investigated the influence of selected maternal factors on neonatal birth size. Data were collected after delivery from 782 apparently healthy pregnant women and their neonates. A questionnaire on personal, medical, socioeconomic status, smoking habits and exposure to smoking was completed. Maternal weight and height, food frequency intake during pregnancy and haemoglobin le...

INTRODUCTION The present study aimed to investigate the negative perceptions of paternal and maternal smoking and their associated factors among adolescents in Hong Kong. METHODS In a school-based cross-sectional survey in 2010 to 2011, 61,810 Hong Kong secondary school students (mean age 14.6 years, 50.8% boys) reported whether their parents smoked and whether they considered their parents’ sm...