SIDS or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is a nightmare for new parents. There are so many suspected causes that no one really knows what conspires to cause an otherwise healthy baby to die. Cigarette smoke has been shown to be connected to SIDS. It has become common knowledge that babies of mothers who smoke are at a much higher risk of death from SIDS.
Recent studies have found that mothers who smoke during pregnancy often have other things going on which may create a less than healthy environment to raise a baby in. Even poverty is listed as a risk factor for newborn SIDS, along with suffocation or overlaying. These many factors combine to create a syndrome that has no real rhyme or reason. But this new study has found that mothers who smoke while pregnant and babies who have nicotine exposure in utero do suffer from problems with their breathing and are more likely to suffer from infant apnea and could die from SIDS.
The continuing research in SIDS is to determine whether some infants especially infants exposed to nicotine in utero may be born with the inability to regulate their own breathing. Besides being bad for your infant smoking is also bad for the mother and everyone in the household as smoking is a known cause of lung cancer, emphysema and many other health conditions both in the smoker and in those exposed to secondhand smoke.
No matter what a pregnant woman should not smoke, nor should she be around smokers.
