BMJ 2007;334:499 (10 March), doi:10.1136/bmj.39146.416343.BE
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Smoking in pregnancy slows growth of baby's head
Roger Dobson
Abergavenny
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The heads of fetuses of women who smoke during pregnancy grow less than those of fetuses whose mothers don't smoke, a study concludes. But mothers who give up smoking as soon as their pregnancy is confirmed have babies whose head circumference grows as much as those of women who never smoke during pregnancy, it says.
With the help of ultrasound images taken during pregnancy, the researchers found that the circumference of the heads of fetuses of women who smoked throughout pregnancy grew half a millimetre less a week during late pregnancy than those of non-smokers. Femur lengths and abdominal circumferences also increased more slowly in the fetuses of smokers, says the study, which was published online on 28 February in the American Journal of Epidemiology (http://aje.oxfordjournals.org, doi: 10.1093/aje/kwm014).
But the study, which involved 7098 women in the Netherlands, found that growth rates of the fetuses of women
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