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 "Fathers-to-be should quit smoking," said study coauthor Dr Jiabi
Qin, of Xiangya School of Public Health, Central South University,
Changsha, China. "Fathers are a large source of secondhand smoke for
pregnant women, which appears to be even more harmful to unborn
children than women smoking themselves."
Smoking by pregnant women has long been known to increase the risk
of health problems for developing babies, including preterm birth,
low birth weight, and birth defects. But the risk of heart defects
in particular has been less clear, as have the potential effects of
smoking by expectant fathers.
To assess the risk to the fetal heart when either parent smoked, Qin
and colleagues re-analyzed data from 125 previous studies that
altogether involved nearly 8.8 million parents from around the
world. The studies looked at smoking by pregnant mothers, smoking by
fathers while mothers were pregnant, and mothers' exposure to
second-hand smoke during pregnancy.
Among all the babies born to the parents in the studies, roughly
137,600 had congenital heart defects.
The new analysis, published in the European Journal of Preventive
Cardiology, found that parental smoking was significantly associated
with risk of congenital heart defects in newborns, with an increased
risk of 25 percent when mothers smoked while pregnant.
The link was even stronger when fathers smoked. Compared to babies
whose parents didn't smoke, babies of fathers who smoked when
mothers were pregnant had a 74 percent higher risk of heart defects
at birth, while second-hand smoke exposure for mothers-to-be more
than doubled the risk.
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Women's exposure to secondhand smoke was risky for their offspring
during all stages of pregnancy and even prior to becoming pregnant,
Qin said in an email.
While women who smoked during pregnancy had a higher likelihood of
bearing a child with a congenital heart defect, smoking before
pregnancy did not affect risk, the author said.
The exact mechanisms involved in the association between parental
smoking and CHDs among offspring are still unclear. And
observational studies such as this one can't prove that smoking by
parents actually caused heart defects in babies.
Another limitation of the analysis is that data were lacking on
duration and intensity of parental smoking, the authors
acknowledged.
Still, they conclude, given the study's findings, "Preventing
parental smoking during peri-pregnancy is a priority for (congenital
heart defect) prevention."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2ZUM6DE European Journal of Preventive
Cardiology, online March 23, 2019
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