Nicotine patches in pregnancy
By now we all know the consequences of smoking and health, especially during pregnancy. In addition to the relationship of snuff with lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, smoking in pregnancy is associated with low birth weight baby and the premature delivery . Let snuff therapy or nicotine patches in pregnancy is an important issue for the health of the mother and fetus, but how?
Quitting smoking in pregnancy
The statistics we confirm that in developed countries, between 13 and 25 percent of women smoke during pregnancy . That percentage is also increasing among women in developing countries. Hence any step to quit smoking during pregnancy has been welcomed among physicians and patients for decades. One of them is based replacement therapy nicotine patches.
The nicotine patch has an advantage over the cigarette and contains only nicotine, but this substance alone is a major risk factor because it produces vasoconstriction and this leads to hypoxia [oxygen deprivation], which may adversely affect the embryo and later in the fetus . For this reason, there is general agreement that the best smoking cessation in pregnancy are behavioral therapies, but experts also admit that the treatment of nicotine replacement is less dangerous than snuff, and its use is recommended in different medical guidelines. However, to date there has been minimal, and little research on this topic. The reason for the dearth of research on nicotine patches in pregnancy is that it is more difficult to conduct clinical trials in pregnancy due to side effects that can cause certain drugs to the fetus.
Nevertheless, a recent study revealed that children of women who used nicotine gum or patches during pregnancy had infantile colic more frequently than those infants whose mothers had not smoked or used any nicotine REPLACING therapy. The study took as a reference to 15,000 women had smoked during pregnancy. Some 1,200 had used nicotine gum or patches and had smoked at some time during pregnancy and 207 women had used any of these therapies with nicotine, but had not smoked. The incidence of colic in infants breastfeeding was higher among children of women who had used the patch or nicotine gum, 11 percent versus 7 percent in the children of nonsmokers.

One concern of parents at this time is the significant increase in rates of teenage pregnancy . The responsibility involved in bringing a child into the world and its consequences can not be tackled maturely by people who have not completed their growth, physical and emotional. It is essential then work to prevent an unwanted pregnancy occurs in our teens.

