Smoking is harmful to health and is especially harmful to pregnant women because it can also harm the fetus. The problem is that some women smokers may experience anxiety about quitting when they find out they are expecting a baby. Now, a new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London has found that regular use of nicotine replacement products, such as e-cigarettes or nicotine patches, is not associated with adverse events or poor pregnancy outcomes.
The study used data from the Pregnancy Randomized Controlled Trial of Electronic Cigarettes and Patches (PREP), funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Specifically, data from 1,140 pregnant smokers who attended 23 hospitals in England and a smoking cessation service in Scotland were analyzed, with the aim of comparing pregnancy outcomes in women who did or did not consume nicotine in the form of electronic cigarettes or nicotine patches regularly during pregnancy.
The researchers took measurements of the levels of cotinine – a substance in tobacco that is used to measure exposure to active and passive smoke – in saliva at the beginning and towards the end of pregnancy, and collected information on cigarette or types of nicotine replacement products by each participant, respiratory symptoms, and birth weight and other data of their babies at birth. Their findings have been published in Addiction Journal.
Help to quit smoking during pregnancy
These scientists found that e-cigarettes were used more frequently in the study group than nicotine patches (47% compared to 21%), and that women who smoked and also used one of the nicotine replacement products during gestation had babies with the same birth weight as women who only smoked, while babies born to women who did not smoke during pregnancy did not differ in birth weight, regardless of whether or not they used nicotine products. Regular use of nicotine products was not associated with any adverse effects on mothers or their babies.
“The trial provides answers to two important questions, one practical and the other related to our understanding of the risks of smoking. E-cigarettes helped pregnant smokers quit without posing any detectable risk to pregnancy compared to quitting without using more nicotine. Therefore, using nicotine-containing aids to quit smoking during pregnancy appears safe. “The harms caused by smoking during pregnancy, at least in late pregnancy, appear to be due to other chemicals in tobacco smoke rather than nicotine,” said Professor Peter Hajek of the Wolfson Institute for Population Health. from Queen Mary University of London and principal investigator.
“E-cigarettes helped pregnant smokers quit without posing any detectable risk to pregnancy compared to quitting without using more nicotine.”
“Tobacco smoking is one of the leading causes of problems during pregnancy, including cases of stillbirths, spontaneous abortions and low birth weight. Helping people to stop smoking completely, as soon as possible, is the best way to improve pregnancy outcomes,” Caitlin Notley, Professor of Addiction Sciences at Norwich Medical School, told Science Media Center UK. , University of East Anglia (United Kingdom), who was not involved in the study.
In her opinion, “it is really reassuring that people who quit smoking using an e-cigarette during pregnancy in this study had better pregnancy outcomes than women who continued smoking tobacco, and did not have worse outcomes than those who did not smoke in pregnancy.” absolute”. Suggesting that “the safety profile of e-cigarettes does not differ from that of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), and they could be considered as a form of NRT and also recommended to pregnant women to quit smoking, especially since tobacco smoking It is very harmful.”
