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Impact of smoking on the weight of a new born child

Lifetime smokers in the 1946 cohort were three times more likely than people who had never smoked to have died by the age of sixty.

Longitudinal data from the 1958, 1970 and Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) provide insights not only on who smokes but the lifetime impacts of drinking and smoking. In the 1958 cohort, individuals who did manual work and those with no qualifications were more likely to smoke through the lifecourse. Evidence from the 1970 cohort reveals similar patterns - at age 30 just 20 per cent of men educated to degree level smoked compared with 47 per cent of men with no qualifications. Mothers in the MCS showed the same marked differences in smoking behaviour depending on their socio economic circumstances [1].

There is a long history of using data from cohort studies to understand the effects of smoking in pregnancy. More than 30 years ago, birth cohort study findings provided clear evidence of the links between mothers smoking in pregnancy and various adverse outcomes in their children, such as infant mortality and low birth weight [2]. Interestingly, although children of mothers who smoked during pregnancy were lighter at birth, from adolescence these children had the greater risk of being in the fattest 10 per cent in terms of Body Mass Index (BMI) (1958 cohort). By the age of 33, children of smoking mothers had a 40 per cent greater risk of being obese compared with the children of non-smokers.

References

Schoon I and Parsons S (2003) 'Lifestyle and health-related behaviour' in Ferri E, Bynner J and Wadsworth M (eds.) Changing Britain, Changing Lives: Three generations at the turn of the century. London: Institute of Education
Butler N, Goldstein H and Ross E (1972) 'Cigarette Smoking in Pregnancy: Its influence on low birth weight and perinatal mortality' (PDF, 921Kb), British Medical Journal Vol 2 pp 127-130