Daily HealthBeat Tip - January 16, 2007

Smoking, genes and cleft palate

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

A genetics study finds an added danger in smoking – an unusual link to a common birth defect, cleft lip and palate.

Researchers in the United States and Denmark looked at a gene for a protein that helps the body deal with toxic substances. Jeff Murray of the University of Iowa says mothers who smoke a pack a day, and whose fetuses lack both working copies of this gene, have the highest risk.

"The chance of them having a child with a cleft is about one in 50 pregnancies, as opposed to one in one-thousand pregnancies for women who don’t smoke and where their fetuses have normal copies of the gene." (11 seconds)

Murray says women shouldn’t smoke before or during pregnancy.

The study in the American Journal of Human Genetics was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: January, 18 2007