-->Oct. 30, 2002 --Women who don't finish high school are not only
Oct. 30, 2002 --Women who don't finish high school are not only less likely to quit smoking during pregnancy, they are more likely to smoke before they become pregnant and relapse after the baby is delivered. The biggest study to date shows that education is the strongest predictor of whether a woman smokes before, during, or after pregnancy.
Researchers say the study shows that the negative health effects of low educational status are multifaceted and continue to grow over time, even when women have increased access to healthcare.
The study used information on more than 8,000 women. The results are published in the November issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
Researchers found that smoking rates among women with a college degree decreased by 30% from the period before pregnancy to three years after the baby was delivered. But those rates remained unchanged among women without a high school diploma.
Education also emerged as the most influential factor affecting smoking status during all three periods examined -- 12 months before, during, and up to three years after pregnancy.
"Compared with women who had graduated from college, women who had not graduated from high school were more than 4 times as likely to smoke during the 12 months before delivery," writes study author Robert Kahn, MD, of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.
Women who had not completed high school were also one-third as likely to quit smoking during pregnancy than college-educated women.
Having other smokers in the household and alcohol use by the mother also had a big influence on whether the women smoked before, during, and after their pregnancy. For example, women who lived with another smoker were four times as likely to relapse and start smoking again.
Researchers say they were surprised to find that although women who had symptoms of depression tended to be smokers, having these symptoms did not affect whether the woman started or quit smoking. Those findings conflict with previous studies that show depression tends to decrease the likelihood of quitting.
But the study researchers say the high rates of postpartum depression and smoking relapse suggest that more research is needed on the relationships between pregnancy, smoking, and depression.
