Mom's Smoking Raises Kids' Adult Heart Risk

And Dad's secondhand smoke can cause long-term trouble, too, study finds.

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
Friday, March 2, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

FRIDAY, March 2 (HealthDay News) -- Women who smoke during pregnancy can cause permanent damage to their child's circulatory system, which can increase risks for heart disease and stroke later in life, Dutch researchers report.

"The kids of the mothers who smoked when they were pregnant have an increased atherosclerosis [hardening of the arteries] compared with kids whose mothers didn't smoke," said researcher Dr. Michiel L. Bots, an associate professor of clinical epidemiology at the University Medical Center Utrecht. "Pregnancy is a critical period for damage from smoke exposure," he added.

His team's analysis of data from the Netherlands Atherosclerosis Risk in Young Adults study found that people exposed to smoke when their mothers were pregnant had permanent cardiovascular damage that could be detected in young adulthood.

The findings were expected to be presented Friday at the American Heart Association's Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention in Orlando, Fla.

In addition, smoking during pregnancy can result in compromised intrauterine growth and low birth weight, Bots noted.

In the study, Bots and colleagues collected data on 732 people born between 1970 and 1973.

They found that, at the age of 30, adult children of the 215 mothers who smoked during their pregnancy had thicker walls of the carotid arteries in the neck -- an early sign of atherosclerosis -- compared with adult children whose mothers didn't smoke.

Offspring whose pregnant mothers were exposed to smoke had 13.4 micrometers thicker carotid artery walls by the time they reached young adulthood compared to the offspring of mothers who did not smoke during pregnancy.

Fathers weren't left off the hook, either. If both parents smoked during pregnancy, by 30 years of age, their children had thicker artery walls than people with one smoking parent or parents who did not smoke, the researchers noted.

Moreover, the more the mother smoked, the thicker the carotid artery walls of her offspring, Bots's team found.