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Monthly Feature

Maternal Smoking in Pregnancy Increases Risk of Childhood Asthma
January, 2004

Mothers who smoke during pregnancy greatly increase their child's risk of developing asthma in the first seven years of life, according to a study of almost 60,000 births.
Researchers focused on 58,841 births in Finland in 1987-1994 and followed the children for seven years. The risk of developing asthma during a child's first seven years was 25 percent higher if the mother smoked less than 10 cigarettes a day and 36 percent higher if the mother smoked more than 10 cigarettes a day during pregnancy when compared with non-smoking mothers.
Among those whose mothers smoked during pregnancy, the average birth weight was 250 grams lower than babies born to non-smoking mothers, and babies born to smoking mothers were three times as likely to be small for gestational age.
Both low birth weight and small gestational age have been linked to childhood asthma in other studies.

The study was published in the January 2004 American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 94, No.1, 136-140