Study: Fathers smoking may be more harmful to

unborn children than mothers

It is known that smoking in the mother negatively affects the health of the fetus and may lead to premature labor or birth defects. But how dangerous is fathers'' smoking to the health of their unborn children, and can it cause heart and developmental problems? What did the study say?

A new study suggests that smoking by fathers, not just mothers, may increase the risk of fetuses developing heart problems.

"Men who will become fathers should quit smoking ... Fathers are a great source of secondhand smoke for pregnant women, and they seem to be more harmful to fetuses than women," said Dr. Giappi Ken of the School of Public Health at Central South University in Chang Sha, China. Smokers themselves. "

Smoking in pregnant women has long been known to increase the risk of a developing fetus developing health problems, including premature birth, low birth weight and birth defects. However, the risk of heart problems in particular was not evident to the same extent, as was the potential impact of smoking in expectant parents.

To assess a fetus’s risk of developing heart problems due to a parent’s smoking, Kane and colleagues re-analyzed data from 125 previous studies that included a total of 8.8 million mothers and fathers worldwide. The studies examined the issue of smoking by pregnant mothers, smoking by fathers during pregnancy, and exposure of pregnant women to secondhand smoke.

Of the children born to mothers and fathers studied, about 137,000 had heart problems.

The new analysis, published in the European Journal of Heart Disease Prevention, concluded that parental smoking is highly associated with a fetus'' risk of developing heart problems, and that the risk increases by 25 percent when mothers smoke during pregnancy.

And this link gets stronger when parents smoke. Compared to fetuses whose fathers and mothers did not smoke, fetuses of fathers who smoked during pregnancy were 74 percent more likely to have heart problems at birth while the effect more than doubles when mothers are exposed to secondhand smoke.