Smoking in home raises risk to pregnancy

Pregnant women whose partners smoke at home are 17 percent more likely to miscarry than women with nonsmoking partners, highlighting the need for tougher tobacco control in families, a Chinese study found.

The study used free prepregnancy checks to gather information on 5.77 million nonsmoking rural Chinese women aged 20-49 and their partners, 29 percent of whom were smokers. Data was gathered from 2010 to 2016.

While the overall rate of spontaneous miscarriage was about 2.5 percent, the rate rose by 0.42 percentage points for those with smoking partners and fell by 0.12 percentage points among nonsmokers.