“Intrauterine exposure to smoking determines a very long series of risks: preterm birth, low birth weight, risks to the development of the lungs, the cardiovascular system” and also the “brain, with consequences that persist in the long term, up to adult life , such as obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, behavioral problems and heart disease. ” The speakers of the conference remember it ‘Brain under attack‘, organized by ‘Mohre X Neuromed‘. By reviewing the dangers of smoking ‘pink’, the experts focused on the possible brain damage that cigarettes lit during pregnancy can produce in the future baby. Among the dangers, there are also possible repercussions on the IQ.
Just under half the Italian women who smoke – remembers a note from Mohre (Mediterranean Observatory for Harm Reduction in Medicine) e Irccs Neuromed of Pozzilli, Isernia – and 38% do it every day. Mature women (50%) smoke more than girls (39%), women from the South (50%) more than those from the Center (45%) and the North (39%). More in the upper social classes than in the middle and middle-lower classes, in contrast to what happens for males (Astra Ricerche data for the Veronesi Foundation). “Women smoke too much – he observes Fabio Beatrice, scientific director of the conference – 34.7% of Italians light ‘3 or more cigarettes a day’, 9.7% ‘not every day, sometimes’ or ‘1-2 cigarettes a day’. Ten out of 100 women light at least 16 cigarettes a day, one in three smokers has smoked for at least twenty years. “And those who don’t stop when they are expecting a baby, she points out Giacomo Mangiaracina, director of the PNA (National Agency for Prevention) and member of Mohre’s board, “expose the fetus to toxic substances resulting from combustion”, risking “dramatic effects on the child’s health, to which are added risks of developing damage that accumulates if the mother smokes , even a little, during breastfeeding and with exposure to secondhand smoke “.
For Beatrice “we must think of different strategies to help women, who develop lung cancer almost as much as men, and their children. For example, taking advantage of a moment when they are more sensitive, pregnancy which represents a ‘window of admissibility’ of proposals, but with medium-term programs and follow-up of at least 2-5 years, that range of time in which relapses occur most often. Women “in fact” return to smoking after having stopped breastfeeding “, and” that is a critical moment in which it is possible to intervene with first and second line programs “.
“Secondhand smoke and ‘third hand’ smokingdue to contact with surfaces soaked in burnt aerosol – continue the experts – it is not good for the little ones: the probability of sudden cot death increases by 6 times in the first months of life, it raises the risk of allergic asthma in males, to which are added recurrent ear infections and bronchitis; the risk of the child becoming a smoker himself increases by at least 5 times compared to the children of non-smokers. This risk rises to 8 times more if both parents smoke “.
“Even one cigarette a day smoked by the mother – Mohre and Neuromed warn – doubles the risk of Suddenly infant death (Sid, Suddenly infant death), which increases in proportion to the number of cigarettes smoked. This was revealed by” a study on “‘Pediatrics ‘, which added like from one to 20 cigarettes a day the probability of Sid increases linearly, with each additional cigarette smoked per day increasing the odds by 0.07. It has been estimated that 22% of SIDs in the United States can be directly attributed to maternal smoking during pregnancy and that interventions to help women quit are tools to reduce the child’s life risk. “
Again, the speakers of the conference report “the results of a meta-analysis on 25 studies that have linked maternal smoking during pregnancy and intelligence quotient (IQ) in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The overall estimate showed that subjects who had been exposed to maternal smoking during pregnancy had lower Qi scores than those not exposed to maternal smoking in all age groups. ”