Smoking and pregnancy: an effective program to help pregnant women stop smoking

An interventional program to prevent atopy in children was effective to help pregnant women stop smoking, say the results of a Danish study presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) in Copenhagen .

Maternal smoking during pregnancy is an important risk factor, but preventable, asthma and allergy for children, remember Ola Storro and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

The Norwegian authorities have decided to establish in 2000 a program for the prevention of asthma and allergies in children, whose effectiveness was assessed by a rigorous scientific study involving 1,703 pregnant women living Trondheim.

As part of this interventional program, participants (and their husbands, they also smoked) had the opportunity to participate in smoking cessation groups. All health professionals involved (doctors, midwives ...) encouraged participants to stop smoking or gave their support when they were arrested, each time they had the chance. Furthermore, other measures have been undertaken in parallel, as a reduction of moisture in the home and supplementation omega 3 fatty acid for the mother during pregnancy and the child.

The researchers, who have established a control cohort in the same city a year before the launch of the program, presented some results of this project during an oral session.

Smoking habits were regularly assessed in both groups at the beginning of pregnancy and regularly during the two years of the study.

Based on data collected at the end of the interventional program, the proportion of smokers was significantly lower among participants in interventional program than in the control cohort (5.8% against 9%). Based on specific studies, the prevalence of maternal smoking in Trondheim was 34% in 1987 and 22% in 1994, the authors note.

And national legislation against smoking campaigns occurred in 2002 may have contributed to the success of this program, they comment, noting that women who stopped smoking during pregnancy in the program have not resumed after the childbirth, while the majority of those in the control group resumed their bad habits.

The researchers will now compare their results with national data on smoking during pregnancy. It also remains to verify that this interventional program can well reduce the risk of asthma and allergies in children whose mothers stopped smoking.