Tobacco Documents Online

TIME' August 17, 1962 Smoking During Pregnarncy The U.S. Government plans to persuade 2,000 women to stop smoking. The aim is not simply to encourage abstinence from tobacco, nor will'a woman become eligible merely by making known her desire to give up cigarettes. To qualify, a woman must have smoked during one recent pregnancy ~ and be willing to quit smoking while car- rying another childl The experiment has been organized by ~~ the National Institutes of Health as part of a huge ten-year study of''Sp,ooo preg- nancies nancies and the health and growth of the ~~ resulting, childi•en. Smoking during, preg« ~_ nancy is of special interest to the research- ! ers because women who smoke seem more ~ likely to have •their babies prematurely. Q And prematurity, despite recent medical progress• is a hazardl to health and even \ life: 50% of all babies who die in the first, month after delivery are among the 7~'J born prernaturely. Some doctors, though. see no direct connection bet'ween, smok- ing and prematurity; they argue that the problem is a matter of temperament, that high.strung womeni who smoke would have a highiproportion of "preemies" any- way. To make sure. NIH's Dr. Richard Masland wants to check tihe same mothers before and' after they quit smoking. The.design of'the experiment is straight- forwardl enough; and it might have been started, earlier but for one drawback: there was no way to check on the women, being tested to, make sure that they did', not' sneak an occasional, secret drag. Now NIH has found a, chemical detective. Researchers at San Antonio's SoutharPCr Research Institute have demonstratedi that acetonitrile-a breakdown product' of burned tobacco-can be detecred in the: urine of anyone who smokes three ormore cigarettes a day. Thc women participating, in the experiment, will have to give daily urine specimens for analysis to make sure they are not cheating. h1EDZCAL ThiIBM ' July 30, 1962 Women to Be Pa'jidl To Stop Smeking In Perinatal Study Mediaal ?Wbune- World WEdelieport' Washington Bureau - BETHESDA, MD. - The Government is go- ing to pay a group, of pregnant women to stop smoking in order, to check prelimi- nary findings that excessive cigarette smoking causes prematurity. Dr. Richard Masland, director of the National! Institute of Neurological Dis- eases and Blindness, saidl the new study was designed'to provide answers to critics who contend that "it is the not the smok- ing ba the type of, woman who smokes that is likely to cause the unfavorable out'- come." "The only way to answer this is to get a group of' women who smoke to stop," he saidi "But we have to be sure that we 'can : believe them when they say that they have stopped smoking. We are therefore work- ing on a urinalysis to test for a by-product of the smoke. We shall' select a group of women andi will pay half of' them to stop sihoking, andl the urine will indicate whether they actually have. We can then . determine whet!her smoking infiuences the outcome of' the pregnancy:"' The new study will be part of the -massive perinatal collaborative project4 ;now in its fourth year,,in which data have been compiled on more than 23,000 preg- . nant women and 17,000 children at 15 participating medical centers. . Preliminar; data indicate that~ pre+ maturity occurs more frequ~ntly among mothers who smoke than among non- smokers, with a correlation between the degree of' prematurity and the amount of smokiug-the more a woman smoked, the less her infant is likely to weigh. Although the study did not attempt to explain this phenomenon, investigators at'. Baltimore City Hospital, where the first studies were conducted, suggestthat smok- ing could'cause prematurityinotde or both of' two ways: nicotine, as alvasoconstrict- ing agent, could reduce the blood supply to the fetus; or the mother could be sub- stituting cigarettes for foodlandlthus, also,, be depriving, the fetus of nourishment. -