10 Interesting Facts about Smoking before and during Pregnancy

Smoking during pregnancy means diabetes and obesity for the future baby. In honor of the recent World No Tobacco Day, which was observed on November 17, Geniuspregnancy wants to remind you of the consequences of smoking during pregnancy.

Both mother’s and father’s smoking are dangerous for the unborn child. And if you still do not believe, Geniuspregnancy offers you the top 10 scientific facts about smoking before and during pregnancy.

1. Smoking reduces fertility in both men and women. After smoking for 5 years, a woman’s ability to conceive decreases by 14%, and that of a man reduces by 11%.
2. A male body removes nicotine faster, than that of a woman – in about 3 months. If you are planning to get pregnant, you and your man should stop smoking much earlier before that.
3. The women, who smoke, have a more difficult pregnancy, than those, who have never smoked or dropped before conception. Early toxemia, preeclampsia, varicose veins, constipation, and dizziness are consequences of smoking before and during pregnancy.
4. Vitamin C destroys much faster in the body of a smoking woman, which leads to its deficit. As a result, one suffers from metabolic diseases, low immunity, depression, and fatigue.
5. The women, who are smoking in the periconceptional period, face the 8 to10 times higher risk of miscarriage.
6. In the families, where one or both parents smoke, the children are twice more likely to suffer from pneumonia, bronchitis and asthma, and 6 times more likely to have gastro-intestinal diseases.
7. Smoking constricts blood vessels and violates the process of oxygen saturation in the blood. This is especially dangerous during pregnancy, because there must be a sufficient amount of oxygen in the blood of the mother for the proper development of the fetus.
8. The girls, whose mother was smoking during pregnancy, are more likely to suffer from infertility in the future.
9. The children of the mothers, who were smoking during pregnancy, are born with low birth weight and weak lungs.
10. As a result of the study, which had been lasting for 33 years, the scientists from the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden) found that those children, whose mothers had been smoking more than 10 cigarettes per day before the birth of the child, had the risk of diabetes increased by 4.5 times. And the risk of obesity was 34-38% higher than among those children, whose mothers had not smoked. These diseases were found in adolescence. The doctors say that smoking produces a toxic influence on the fetus and causes fetal malnutrition. Therefore, the child develops a tendency to accumulate fat.

So, lighting another cigarette, remember that parental smoking during pregnancy not only affects the baby here and now, but reveals itself in the child’s adult life, causing entirely unwanted health problems.