By now, we are all aware of the toxic substances that tobacco contains, as well as the many harmful effects that smoking during pregnancy can have on the development of the fetus , since it is a habit that entails a increased risk of miscarriage or low birth weight, and even that the child suffers from various health problems, such as asthma, allergies, respiratory diseases or neurological disorders, among other disorders.
Now, new research comes to add to this discourse that encourages pregnant women to say no to tobacco because it not only harms them, but also their offspring.
The study, carried out by researchers from the New York Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Finnish researchers, has found a relationship between smoking during pregnancy and an increase in pregnancy. risk of children becoming schizophrenic as adults. This increase in those cases in which the pregnant woman smokes a lot has been estimated at 38% .
The results, which have been published recently in the American Journal of Psychiatry, are based on a research work carried out on a thousand cases of patients with schizophrenia who were born in Finland between 1983 and 1998.
Alan Brown, lead author of the research, explains that “this is the first biomarker-based study to demonstrate the relationship between prenatal nicotine exposure and schizophrenia . And, to do so, we have used the largest sample of schizophrenia cases to date in a study of these characteristics ”.
Based on the cotinine levels presented by the analyzes performed on the pregnant women – cotinine is a reliable biological marker of the presence of nicotine in blood samples – the researchers found that up to 20% of mothers of children who after they developed schizophrenia they had smoked during their pregnancy. According to the analysis carried out, in the case of those women who were heavy smokers, the risk increased to 38%.
These results, according to Brown, highlight the importance of public health education, since pregnant women must be duly informed of the potential risks that smoking can have on the health of their offspring in the short, medium and long term.
