Researchers from Western University in Ontario, Canada, affirm that smoking by pregnant women can prove injurious to life of fetus and also cause long-term risk of obesity. Have you ever thought of life of a tiny fetus locked inside the mother’s womb that can breathe only through the blood supply of mother and that too loaded with nicotine?

Experts said that smoking by pregnant women simply means infusing poison to the baby’s blood. Women have always been urged by health experts to quit habit of smoking, especially when they are pregnant. Some pregnant women also followed Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) to leave smoking, but such therapies also posed equal harm to the health of baby.

The research has been published online in the journal ‘Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology’ by Daniel Hardy, PhD, of the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. As per statistical figures revealed, about 20% of pregnant women in Canada are having habit of smoking, leading to obesity in about 47% of newborn babies.

Hardy along with Alison Holloway, PhD, of McMaster University, conducted their research on pregnant laboratory rats by offering nicotine to them. They found rat offspring, even if they were born with small, suffered with obesity after six months period.

Hardy said that he is putting his efforts to find out whether increased prenatal doses of folic acid could be used to alter the effects of nicotine.