Everyone knows that smoking during pregnancy could harm both the mother and the baby. If you are a pregnant mom who smokes and still does, despite your knowledge about its harmful effects to your little one, a new study suggested another reason why you should quit. Smoking during pregnancy may harm the later-life aerobic fitness of male offsprings.
Smoking while pregnant increases the risk of preterm birth, birth defects and infant death. Unfortunately, Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shared that, despite the risk of smoking while pregnant, expectant moms continue to smoke. The data for 2011 from 24 States of America found that around 10 percent of women reported that they still smoke during the last trimester of their pregnancy.
Aside from the aforementioned risks associated to smoking during pregnancy, the lead author of the study, Dr. Maria Hagnas, of the University of Oulu in Finland, and colleagues suggested that smoking during pregnancy can also affect the aerobic fitness of male offspring later in life, Medical News Today has learned.
"Our study adds to the existing evidence base of the negative and long-standing impacts of maternal smoking," Hagnas said.
The study involved 508 men with an average age of 19 and they were subjected through a 12-minute running test known as the Cooper test. The aerobic fitness reflects the body's ability to take in and use oxygen during aerobic exercise in order to supply energy to the muscle cells. The lower one's aerobic fitness, the less oxygen the body ingests. Aerobics exercise includes walking, jogging, running, swimming, cycling and other activities that require the heart, lungs and muscles to work hard.
The researchers found out that men with smoking mothers demonstrated a lower aerobic fitness on the running test than those whose mothers did not smoke. The study was independent of the mother and offspring's BMI. It did not consider the offspring's smoking status and physical activities as well.
Aside from this, researchers also identified a lower aerobic fitness among men whose mothers experienced excessive weight gain during pregnancy and who had high pre-pregnancy BMI. However, they learned that this risk could be mediated through the offspring's weight.
This study is another evidence of the long-term health risks associated to smoking during pregnancy. For this reason, Dr. Geeta Kumar, chair of Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), is calling out pregnant moms to stop smoking. He even suggested that quitting is one of the most important things expectant moms should do to improve their baby's health.
For moms who wanted to give up smoking, check out this page to get some useful tips on how to quit the habit.
The study is published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
