Doctors specialising in care of mothers-to-be have called for greater access during pregnancy to smoking cessation programmes after an audit of baby deaths showed more than a sixth of the women who suffered perinatal loss were smokers.
Perinatal mortality refers to the death of a baby in the weeks before or after birth.
While the authors of the Perinatal Mortality in Ireland Annual Report 2011 did not directly blame smoking for causing any of the 491 infant deaths that year, they said getting the women to quit was “one of the most effective health interventions for improving perinatal outcomes”. The authors said “smoking cessation requires priority” during pregnancy.
Data collected as part of the audit by the National Perinatal Epidemiology Centre, based at UCC, showed that of 397 women whose smoking status was recorded when making their first hospital appointment, 70 were smokers at the time. Eight subsequently quit but the remainder smoked throughout their pregnancy.
The report’s authors recommended healthcare providers increase efforts to assess and record the smoking status of all pregnant women in Ireland, both at the antenatal booking visit and during the third trimester, “given its importance as a risk factor for adverse perinatal outcomes”.
Source: Catherine Shanahan, Irish Examiner, 23/10/13
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