Cape Town - Women who are trying to quit smoking while pregnant can safely use nicotine replacement therapy patches without worrying about harming their babies, a new international study has shown.
The study, published in the Lancet this month, said nicotine patches were not found to aid long-term efforts to give up smoking, but were beneficial for many pregnant smokers, who otherwise would expose their babies to adverse effects of smoking.
Smoking during pregnancy is associated with infant developmental problems, including harm to brain development.
Some of the problems experienced by children of smokers include respiratory and heart problems, birth defects, and neurological disorders such as attention deficit disorder.
Smoking mothers are also more likely to experience miscarriage, premature births and still-births.
While animal tests had found the nicotine patch to be toxic, the new study found no association between patch use and developmental harm on humans.
The study, which compared the effects of nicotine patches and placebo on more than 1 000 infants born to smokers, and tracked their development two years after birth, found no association between patch use and developmental impairment or disability.
Not only is nicotine regarded as poisonous to the foetus, research has also shown that nicotine from either smoking or nicotine patches might stimulate nicotinic receptors at inappropriate times during development resulting in birth defects.
In rats nicotine has been associated with harming the growth and development of nervous tissue and early brain development.
In the new study researchers found that 73 percent of infants of mothers who used nicotine patches had no impairment compared with 65 percent of infants in the placebo group.
This finding was associated with reduced maternal smoking during pregnancy.
According to researchers, those using the nicotine patch had reduced their smoking more than those in the placebo group for at least four weeks during the second trimester – an important period in embryo development. Most neurons in a foetus develop during the first and second trimester of the pregnancy.
The study, however, showed that while patches were associated with positive developmental outcomes on infants, it was not so good in helping mothers quit smoking in the long term.
At two years after birth of their babies, only three percent of mothers on the patch sustained their smoking abstinence since quitting during pregnancy, and only two percent of those in placebo abstained from smoking.
Researcher Dr Sue Cooper, from the University of Nottingham in the UK, wrote that while the patch was not effective in helping smokers quit for good, the findings showed that this form of therapy could be beneficial to moms-to-be even if it’s for a short term.
Cape Argus