More than half of women who smoke before pregnancy quit while pregnant, according to research published in the May 2 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Lauren Kipling, Ph.D., from the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues used data from the 2021 Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System to estimate the prevalence of smoking before, during, and after pregnancy and quitting behaviors during pregnancy.
The researchers found that the prevalence of cigarette smoking was 12.1, 5.4, and 7.2 percent before, during, and after pregnancy, respectively; more than half (56.1 percent) of women who smoked before pregnancy quit while pregnant. The jurisdiction-specific prevalences of smoking were 3.5 to 20.2 percent, 0.4 to 11.0 percent, and 1.0 to 15.1 percent before pregnancy, during pregnancy, and during the postpartum period, respectively. The percentage of women with a health care visit who reported that a health care provider asked about smoking was 73.7, 93.7, and 57.3 percent, respectively, at any health care visit before pregnancy, during pregnancy, and at the postpartum checkup.
“Routine assessment of smoking behaviors among pregnant and postpartum women can guide the development and implementation of evidence-based tobacco control measures at the jurisdiction and health care-system level to reduce smoking,” the authors write.
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