Obstetrics: Smoking & Pregnancy

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Doctors are so accustomed to hearing about bad effects of smoking that the report by four U.S. Navy physicians came as something of a shock.

After a study of 48,505 pregnant wives, half of whom were smokers, Lieut. Commander Paul B. Underwood and his colleagues told the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, their collected data provide no proof that smoking by a mother harms her unborn child, and in one way it appears to help.

It is true enough, said Dr. Underwood, that mothers' smoking at any stage of pregnancy resulted in the birth of smaller-than-average babies. But these had a lower death rate than that of other premature children, and within a year they caught up with the heavier babies of nonsmoking mothers.

What the Navy researchers found still more surprising was that the 10-to-30-cigarettes-a-day women had fewer incidents of the mysterious condition called "the toxemia of pregnancy." Early symptoms of this trouble are usually rising blood pressure, rapid weight gain and headache, followed by urinary difficulties and abdominal pain. This stage is "pre-eclampsia." The later stage of true eclampsia involves convulsions and threatens the lives of mother and child. Both the moderate and severe forms were less common among smoking than among nonsmoking mothers. Why? The Navy doctors went back to their delivery rooms without hazarding a guess, but hopeful of finding an answer.