PREGNANT women who smoke risk seriously affecting their unborn baby’s
birthweight and later health—even if they only smoke around eight
cigarettes each day.
Lighting up while pregnant is known to lower birthweight. Lucinda England and
her team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta hoped to
find out whether halving the number of cigarettes women smoked would help their
babies. So they looked at records for more than a thousand women who smoked
while pregnant.
Cutting down to eight or more was no help at all, the researchers found
(American Journal of Epidemiology, vol 158, p…
