Smoking In Pregnant Women Could Harm Fertility Of Future Offspring

Smoking during pregnancy has been linked to low-birth weight and other health issues for the future child. Yet now recent findings published in the journal Human Reproduction show that pregnant or breast feeding mothers-to-be who smoke could also harm their future child's fertility.

The study is the first comprehensive animal model to examine the mechanism by which smoking can affect the fertility of male offspring. Furthermore, in the past, findings showed that during pregnancy a number of harmful effects can harm the fetus.

"It would be unethical to deliberately expose pregnant mothers and their offspring to the toxins in cigarettes - we already know that smoking in pregnancy harms the baby in the womb - as babies are often born small and vulnerable to disease. So, in this study we used a mouse animal model, which directly mimics human smoking, to look at what effects the mothers smoking during pregnancy and breast feeding has on the fertility of their male pups," said lead study author Eileen McLaughlin, Director of the Priority Research Center in Chemical Biology at the University of Newcastle (New South Wales, Australia), in a news release. "Our results show that male pups of 'smoking' mothers have fewer sperm, which swim poorly, are abnormally shaped and fail to bind to eggs during in vitro fertilisation studies. Consequently, when these pups reach adulthood they are sub fertile or infertile. This is the first time we have been able to prove conclusively that male baby exposure to cigarette toxins in pregnancy and early life will damage later life fertility."