In this article, the authors investigated the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy on behavioral problems, which were not mediated by lower birth weight, in offspring at 3 y of age. The authors used the Child Behavior Checklist for ages 2-3 y (CBCL/2-3; Achenbach, Edelbrock and Howell) to assess behavioral problems in 1,377 2- to 3-y-old healthy twin pairs. Soon after the birth of twins,...

BACKGROUND To evaluate the association between maternal and paternal smoking during pregnancy, and asthma among offspring. METHODS We conducted a hospital-based birth retrospective observational birth cohort study in a University-based Obstetrics and Gynecology Department, Kuopio University Hospital, Finland. 39 306 women, delivering between 1989 and 2006, were linked to the national register...

OBJECTIVE To examine the association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and the development of smoking behaviour patterns among young adult offspring. METHOD Data were from the Mater-University of Queensland Study of Pregnancy (MUSP), a birth cohort of 7223 mothers and children enrolled in Brisbane, Australia, in 1981. The development of smoking behaviours (early or late onset, or comb...

OBJECTIVE Maternal smoking has been associated with a reduction in newborn birth weight. We sought to estimate how the pattern of maternal smoking throughout pregnancy influences newborn size. METHODS One hundred sixty pregnant smoking women were enrolled in a prospective study. We collected data on maternal age, education, prepregnancy body mass index, and parity, as well as alcohol and illi...

Maternal smoking during pregnancy (SDP) seems associated with reduced birthweight in the offspring. This observation, however, is based on conventional epidemiological analyses, and it might be confounded by unobserved maternal characteristics related to both smoking habits and offspring birth weight. Therefore, we apply a quasi-experimental sibling analysis to revisit previous findings. Using ...

BACKGROUND Maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with significant infant morbidity and mortality, and may influence later disease risk. One mechanism by which smoking (and other environmental factors) might have long-lasting effects is through epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation. OBJECTIVES We conducted an epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) investigating alteration...

OBJECTIVE To explore the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on offspring growth using three approaches: (1) multiple adjustments for socioeconomic and parental factors, (2) maternal-paternal comparisons as a test of putative intrauterine effects and (3) comparisons between two birth cohort studies. METHODS Population-based birth cohort studies were carried out in Pelotas, Brazil, in...

BACKGROUND Evidence regarding the independent and additive effects of both pre- and postnatal smoking exposure on the risk of wheeze in children is limited. The purpose of this prospective pregnancy birth cohort study was to examine the association between prenatal and postnatal tobacco smoke exposure during the first year of life and the risk of wheeze in Japanese children aged 23 to 29 months...

Studies suggest that children exposed to cigarette smoke in utero are at risk of becoming obese. Few researchers have evaluated the dose-response association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and childhood obesity or whether this association varies by maternal race/ethnicity. The authors obtained retrospective cohort data by linking records from the Pregnancy Nutrition Surveillance Syst...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS There is a paucity of evidence about whether exposure to antenatal smoking impacts on offspring's lung function in early adulthood. This study aimed to examine whether (1) in utero exposure to maternal smoking is related to poorer respiratory functioning in early adulthood; (2) the impact of prenatal smoking is independent of postnatal maternal smoking; and (3) the link betw...