Tag Archives: heart defects

Smoking in pregnancy risks psychotic children

in.reuters.com

Smoking in pregnancy risks psychotic children

Mothers who smoke during pregnancy put their children at greater risk of developing psychotic symptoms as teenagers, British scientists said on Thursday.

Researchers from four British universities studied 6,356 12-year-olds and interviewed them for psychotic-like symptoms such as hallucinations or delusions. Around 19 percent had mothers who smoked during pregnancy.

Just over 11 percent, or 734 of the total group, had suspected or definite symptoms of psychosis.

Many previous studies have shown cigarettes can harm the fetuses of mothers who smoke while pregnant. The risks include causing babies to be born smaller and increasing the risk of sudden infant death syndrome or heart defects.

Stanley Zammit, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University’s School of Medicine who led the study, said the more the mothers smoked, the more likely their children were to have psychotic symptoms.

“We can estimate that about 20 percent of adolescents in this cohort would not have developed psychotic symptoms if their mothers had not smoked,” he said.

Despite countless studies flagging up the risks to babies, it is estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of women in Britain smoke during pregnancy.

The researchers also found drinking during pregnancy was associated with increased psychotic symptoms, but only in children whose mothers had drunk more than 21 units of alcohol a week in early pregnancy.

The reasons for the link between maternal smoking and psychotic symptoms are not clear, but Zammit and colleagues suggested that exposure to tobacco in the womb might affect a child’s impulsivity, attention or cognition.

They said more research was needed to investigate how exposure to tobacco in the womb affected children’s brains.

Only a few mothers in the study, which was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, said they had smoked cannabis during pregnancy, and this was not found to have any significant link with psychotic symptoms.

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Overweight mothers linked to infant heart defects

in.reuters.com

Overweight mothers linked to infant heart defects

Women who are overweight or obese when they get pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with congenital heart defects, according to a U.S. government study released on Thursday.

The study, conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concluded that women who were overweight or obese at the time they became pregnant were 18 percent more likely to give birth to babies with heart defects, while severely obese women had a 30 percent increased risk.

The babies had problems including obstructive defects on the right side of the heart and defects in the tissue separating the heart’s two upper chambers, the researchers reported in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

“Congenital heart defects are the most common types of birth defect, and among all birth defects, they are a leading cause of illness, death and medical expenditures,” said Dr. Edwin Trevathan, a CDC expert on birth defects and developmental disabilities.

The CDC, the U.S. government’s disease watchdog, recommends that overweight women work with their doctors to achieve a healthy weight before pregnancy.

Researchers examined the health of 6,440 infants with congenital heart defects and 5,673 infants without problems, all of whose mothers were interviewed as part of the CDC’s National Birth Defects Prevention Study.

They assessed obesity according to each woman’s body mass index, or BMI, which relates weight to height. A woman 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighing 190 pounds (86 kg) would have a BMI of 31.6, while a woman of the same height who weighs 160 pounds (72 kg) would have a BMI of 26.6.

The researchers defined overweight as a BMI of 25 to 29.9, moderate obesity as a BMI of 30 to 34.9 and severe obesity as a BMI of 35 or above.

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