[5][6] It is important to examine these effects because smoking before, during and after pregnancy is not an unusual behavior among the general population and can have detrimental health impacts, especially among both mother and child, as a result.
[13] There is limited evidence that smoking reduces the incidence of pregnancy-induced hypertension,[14] but not when the pregnancy is with multiple babies (i.e. it has no effect on twins, triplets, etc.).
[15] Other effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy include an increased risk for Tourette syndrome and tic disorders.
According to a study published in 2016 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, there is an especially high risk for children to be born with a chronic tic disorder if their mother is a heavy smoker.
With this heavy smoking, researchers have found that there is an increase in risk as high as 66% for the child to have a chronic tic disorder.
Infants exposed to smoke during pregnancy are up to three times more likely to die of SIDS than children born to non-smoking mothers.
This increase in body fat may result from the effects of smoking during pregnancy, which is thought to impact fetal genetic programming in relation to obesity.
While the exact mechanism for this difference is currently unknown, studies conducted on animals have indicated that nicotine may affect brain functions that deal with eating impulses and energy metabolism.
As a result of this alteration to brain function, teenage obesity can in turn lead to a variety of health problems including diabetes (a condition in which the affected individual's blood glucose level is too high and the body is unable to regulate it), hypertension (high blood pressure), and cardiovascular disease (any condition related to the heart but most commonly the thickening of arteries due to excess fat build-up).
For non-pregnant smokers, an often-recommended aid to quitting smoking is through the use of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) in the form of patches, gum, inhalers, lozenges, sprays or sublingual tablets.
Research in the UK has also shown that e-cigarettes could be more effective than nicotine patches, and because of this, could lead to better pregnancy outcomes.
Even in babies exposed to the harmful effects of nicotine through breast milk, the likelihood of acute respiratory illness is significantly diminished when compared to infants whose mothers smoked but were formula fed.
Passive smoking is associated with many risks to children, including, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS),[30][31] asthma,[32][33] lung infections,[34][35][36][37] impaired respiratory function and slowed lung growth,[10] Crohn's disease,[38] learning difficulties and neurobehavioral effects,[39][40] an increase in tooth decay,[41] and an increased risk of middle ear infections.