If pregnant women must quit smokingto preserve the health of their unborn child, it seems that the nicotine patch is not an effective method, according to the results of a study published in the specialist journal the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
Researchers from the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital (Paris) and the National Institute for Medical Research (Inserm), led by Dr Ivan Belin, conducted a study between 2007 and 2012 with 402 pregnant women smoking at least 5 cigarettes per day.
They gave them nicotine patches of 30 mg / day for 16 hours.
“This is the highest daily dose and the longest exposure time tested in a study in pregnant women,” says Dr Berlin, who has received authorization from the French Medicines Agency ( ANSM) to administer this dose.
Disappointing results
The study was carried out double-blind (neither the doctors nor the patients knew the concentrated dose in the patch) and some of the women wore a placebo patch. Treatment started from the 2nd trimester and lasted 105 days.
The researchers obtained inconclusive and disappointing results. Indeed, only 5.5% of women with the patch stopped smoking, roughly the same proportion as participants in the placebo group (5.1%). After 15 days, the smokers resumed smoking.
In addition, babies of both groups were born at a low weight of 3.065 g and 3.015 g while babies of non-smoking women weighed an average of 3.364 grams.
“In France, the frequency of smoking in pregnant women is of the order of 17% in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy, which corresponds to approximately 137,000 fetuses directly exposed to maternal smoking per year and this is a low estimate, ”explains Dr. Berlin based on 2010 data.
“These results are disappointing and should encourage efforts to evaluate new approaches,” the researchers conclude. “In the absence of proof of the effectiveness of nicotine substitutes in pregnant smokers who are very dependent on tobacco (more than 5 cigarettes / day), psycho-behavioral support remains the intervention to be favored to help them stop smoking», They say.
