Sunday, August 04, 2013

Smoking and sex

My subscription to e-mail notifications of new studies coming out of the Christchurch Health and Development Study delivered this finding today:

 Findings across 3 studies using a complement of genetically sensitive research designs suggest that smoking during pregnancy is a prenatal risk factor for offspring conduct problems when controlling for specific perinatal and postnatal confounding factors.

The problem is, according to the new version of the Christchurch study, Growing up in New Zealand, tracking  babies born in the late 2000s:

* More than one in 10 mothers continued to smoke through their pregnancies (with an over-representation of those identifying as Maori and living in the most deprived areas.)

At least teenagers are smoking less according to the Auckland University  Youth Health and Wellbeing survey released last week.

Which reminds me, I've been blogging for a while about the falling teenage birthrate (since 2007) and speculating on reasons why. One could simply be that teenagers are having less sex.

Well it seems that may well be the answer according to the same survey.

In 2001 31.3 percent had "ever had sex" down to 24.4 percent in 2012.

2 comments:

gravedodger said...

Your headline that came up on my shared blog 'No minister' set of a train of largely memory based thought from 50+ years ago that had absolutely no relation to your post.

Cheers M

Lindsay Mitchell said...

So I did you a favour:-)