Support for Pregnant Smokers

Suggested lead: Researchers at Duke University Medical Center hope the results of a new study will help focus attention on the importance of a smoker's partner in successfully becoming a non-smoker. Tom Britt has more.

Friday, January 19, 2001

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Durham, N.C. -- More than 600 pregnant smokers and their partners have been recruited for a pioneering stop-smoking study underway in and around Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Colleen McBride is director of Duke Cancer Prevention, Detection and Control Research. She says about half these partners are smokers themselves, and preliminary research shows there is a definite difference in the approach taken by the partners.

"If they don't smoke they tend to be very negative in their support, so they nag, they police, they don't have much sympathy for what it is to be a smoker and how hard it is to quit. By contrast, the partners who smoke have perhaps too much sympathy and they don't really do much of anything. They're not particularly negative, but they're not particularly positive either because they feel hypocritical, of course."

McBride says the counseling and support will not end with the birth of the baby.