Mom's Smoking Tied to
Adult Children's Lung Disease

The effects of a mother's smoking on her children's lungs may be permanent, possibly furthering the risk of serious lung disease in children who take up the habit themselves, new research suggests.

The UK study found that the adult children of female smokers had smaller lung volumes compared with the children of non-smokers, regardless of whether they themselves smoked.

What's more, among adults who did smoke, those whose mothers smoked had a higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a group of serious lung diseases that includes emphysema.

The study, in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, looked at 2,000 men and women in their 30s, 40s and 50s whose parents had reported their own smoking habits in a study in the 1970s.

The children of women who in the earlier study said they were current smokers and had started before pregnancy were considered as having been exposed to maternal smoking. They were assumed to have been exposed in the womb.

Smoking during pregnancy is already tied to low birth weight and poorer infant and childhood growth, but research suggests that as children get older these effects may diminish, Dr. Mark N. Upton, the lead author of the new study stated.

Whether children can "grow out" of early effects on their lung volume has been unknown. To investigate Upton and his colleagues at the University of Bristol and University of Glasgow conducted respiratory tests that gauge lung volume, and found that participants exposed to maternal smoking appeared to have smaller lungs, regardless of their own smoking status.

"Our results suggest that the effects of maternal smoking on lung size are permanent," Upton said.

Moreover, if children take up smoking themselves, the findings suggest, a mother's smoking may add to the risk of their developing COPD. In this study, a smoker's risk of COPD climbed 70 percent with every 10 cigarettes his or her mother smoked per day.

According to Upton, the findings provide yet another reason for women to quit smoking before pregnancy, but also suggest that it's not "too late" to quit after giving birth.

That's because there was a relationship, albeit weak, between fathers' smoking and poorer lung function among smokers -- indicating that parents' smoking can cause long-range harm after birth as well.

In addition, Upton said, smokers who know their mothers were lighting up when they were young children should be aware that they may face a higher COPD risk. For these smokers, he added, believing "it will never happen to me" is now more difficult.

SOURCE: American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, February 15, 2004.

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