 Study confirms cot death link to smoking
Source: (Australia) The Age by Louise Hall Date: April 21, 2009
Australian researchers have discovered the first evidence that exposure to cigarette smoke induces abnormalities in babies' brains, putting them at increased risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
By
analysing the brain tissue of babies who had undergone an autopsy at
Sydney's Glebe morgue, researchers from the University of Sydney found
exposure to any second-hand smoke could precipitate these brain cell
changes, and not just exposure in utero by maternal smoking.
The
findings provide doctors and health workers with tangible evidence to
persuade mothers and their partners not to smoke during pregnancy and
to keep homes and cars smoke-free during the early months of life.
More
than 1 in 10 women still smoked at some time during pregnancy, the
latest data available in the NSW Mothers and Babies report 2006 said.
Rita
Machaalani, a scientist at the university's Bosch Institute, said
passive smoking had long been identified as a risk factor for SIDS, but
the biological mechanisms that lead to death was unknown until now.
A
death of an infant less than 12 months old that remains unexplained
after thorough investigation is generally diagnosed as SIDS. Although
deaths have halved since public health education programs began in the
early 1990s, it remains the most common cause of death for this age
group in developed countries, affecting an average 88 babies a year in
Australia.
Dr
Machaalani and her colleague Karen Waters showed there was an increase
in cell death in a region of the brain that plays a major role in the
control of breathing and heart function in babies who died of SIDS,
compared to those who died of other causes. The post-mortems of 67 SIDS
infants and 25 infants who died suddenly with another diagnosis between
1997 and 2002 were correlated with risk factors associated with SIDS,
such as tummy sleeping, sharing a bed with adults and exposure to
smoking, obtained during police interviews with the babies' parents and
hospital records.
Of
the 67 SIDS infants, 81 per cent had been exposed to cigarette smoke,
compared to 58 per cent of non-SIDS infants, and 32 per cent were in
bed with a parent when they died.
"No
one in the world has access to such a large dataset of brain tissue or
the ability to correlate the tissue with the autopsy results and a
record of the risk factors and this is what makes our data really
important," Dr Machaalani said.
The
research, published in the journals Brain and Acta Neuropathologica,
found the increase in cell death (apoptosis) was higher not only in
SIDS victims, but in all infants who had a history of tobacco smoke
exposure, in utero and the postnatal period.
"This
study provides further evidence of increased apoptosis in the brainstem
of SIDS infants but shows for the first time these changes are also
affected by age and gender, and by clinical risk factors such as sleep
position and cigarette smoke exposure," the authors concluded.
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