Jump to full article: Sydney Morning Herald (au), 2009-04-02
Author: Danny Rose
Intro: Babies born to smoking mums find it harder to rouse from sleep, say Australian researchers who have probed the link between cigarettes and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
The Melbourne-based study found babies in homes where the mother smoked up to 20 cigarettes daily, during and after the pregnancy, performed poorer on arousal tests.
Associate Professor Rosemary Horne said the research shed new light on why smoking was emerging as a leading SIDS cause.
"With maternal smoking, even though these babies appeared perfectly well and healthy and normal, they did not have the same arousal patterns as those babies whose mums didn't smoke," said Prof Horne, scientific director of the Ritchie Centre for Baby Health Research at Monash University.
"They wake up less, and more of the arousals they do have don't go right up to the cortex, so they don't wake up." , , ,''
Prof Horne's study is published in the journal SLEEP.
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