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Secondhand Smoke and Babies
Does Secondhand Smoke Cause Sleep Disturbances in Infants?
By Kelly Burgess
Interestingly, this study originally wasn't related to smoking at all. At first, the goal was to study the effect of snoring on healthy sleep in normal infants. As Dr. Montgomery-Downs explains, the initial study consisted of 35 infants who all snored. The idea was to see if the snoring caused sleep-disordered breathing, also known as obstructive sleep apnea. What they discovered was puzzling. The babies were not suffering from sleep apnea. However, some of the babies were waking up frequently at night; others were not. Curious, they decided to dig a little more deeply into the environmental factors that may have affected the babies' ability to stay asleep through their snoring. What they discovered was that all of the infants who lived in homes where at least one parent smoked had respiratory-related sleep arousals, compared to just 50 percent living in non-smoking households.
"This was not what we set out to study, but it was a very significant finding and something that can be added to the long list of good reasons to quit smoking," says Dr. Montgomery-Downs.
But that wasn't the end of the study. Curious to see what effect these frequent nightly arousals had on the infants' development, Dr. Montgomery-Downs and her co-author, David Gozal, administered a series of developmental tests on the infants after each sleep study. The infants with higher rates of arousals also had lower scores on the developmental assessments. In other words, secondhand smoke was not only affecting teir respiratory function and disrupting their sleep, but it was interfering with normal, healthy development.
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