Featured Review: Psychosocial interventions to support pregnant women to stop smoking

Reposted with permission from Cochrane Australia.Published recently, the sixth update of the Cochrane Review on Psychosocial interventions for supporting women to stop smoking in pregnancy weighs up the evidence on a critical health and social equity issue. Smoking remains one of the few preventable factors associated with complications in pregnancy, and has serious long-term implications for women and babies. While the number of women smoking in pregnancy is decreasing in high-income countries, where it ’s associated with poverty, it’s increasing in low- to middle-income countries.‘This is now one of the largest reviews in the Cochrane Library,’ explains review author Dr CatherineChamberlain, who has worked on each update of the review since 2003. ‘It includes 102 randomised controlled trials involving almost 30,000 women. Three of these were conducted among Indigenous communities (in Australia, Canada and New Zealand), and nine were conducted in Australia. Smoking during pregnancy is three times more prevalent among Aboriginal and Torres S trait Islander women than among non-Aboriginal women, so we need to look closely at what kinds of interventions can support Indigenous women.’ In this latest update, Catherine and colleagues set out to identify and compare the effectiveness of a range of psychosocial interventions that aim to support pregnant women to stop smoking, including counselling, health education, feedback, social support, incentives and exercise. T...
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