Maternal Cigarette Smoking, Breast-feeding, and Respiratory Tract Infections in Infancy: A Matched-pairs Study

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Abstract
The importance of mothers' smoking habits for the occurrence of respiratory tract infections (RTIs) in their children during their infant years was studied. A group of 28 infants of mothers who smoked was compared with 28 infants of non-smokers. The pairs were matched with respect to mother's age, marital status, occupation, and parity. During their first year of life, the smokers' children were treated with antibiotics because of RTIs more often than the non-smokers' children (p = 0.046). The number of RTIs in the two groups were 38 and 19, respectively. However, infants of mothers who smoked were breast-fed for a shorter period than those of non-smokers (p = 0.028), the mean values being 4.5 and 6.7 months.