A UB research scientist has received a $1.8 million grant to conduct a study that will develop a treatment plan to help pregnant women quit smoking.
According to Clara M. Bradizza, Ph.D., the grant's recipient and senior research scientist at the Research Institute on Addictions (RIA), a large part of quitting smoking is bringing the techniques into a group setting.
"Smoking cessation are attempts to actually quit smoking," Bradizza said. "Often, people will join smoking cessation groups, so a large part of smoking cessation treatment is conducted in a group setting."
About 11.4 percent of women continue smoking throughout their pregnancy in 2002, despite experts' warnings, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Web site.
Pregnant women frequently deal with anger, sadness or frustration with smoking, Bradizza said.
"Negative affect or negative emotions are strongly associated with smoking in most individuals and in particular with pregnant women," she said. "One of the things that makes it very difficult for pregnant smokers to quit is that they will often use cigarettes to manage negative emotions."
Bradizza hopes to develop a treatment plan for pregnant women through breaking the link between negative feelings and cigarettes.
"The goal of our study is to develop an intervention that targets negative affect. It helps women manage negative affect and reduce it and disassociate negative affect with smoking," she said.
The current commonly accepted treatment plans for quitting smoking are typically unsuccessful with pregnant smokers, according to Bradizza.
"That's one of the reasons for our study. We went through the literature and tried to isolate some of the factors that are interfering with our ability to increase smoking cessation rates," she said.
The inability to quit smoking affects many pregnant women but certain women have more trouble than others.
"The focus of our treatment is with women who have traditionally been more difficult to treat. These are women that have less education and who are lower socioeconomic status," Bradizza said. "They have higher rates of smoking and they've been more resistant to treatment."
According to Bradizza, smoking can have lifelong affects on the mother and her baby, so it is ideal for women to quit smoking while pregnant.
"Enabling a woman to quit smoking during her pregnancy may benefit not only her but may have lifelong benefits for the infant," she said. "It's a good opportunity to intervene for her own health to be able to take this opportunity to help her quit smoking."
There are several known negative effects that smoking has on a baby both in the womb and after birth.
"We know that smoking results in significantly lower birth weight for infants...in addition to medical consequences like low birth weight and asthma, there are potential psychological and cognitive consequences of maternal smoking for the baby," Bradizza said.
A study by the US Department of Health and Human Services in 2004 estimated that if all women stopped smoking during pregnancy, there would be an 11 percent drop in stillbirths and a five percent decrease in newborn deaths, according to the March of Dimes Web site. The March of Dimes is an organization that conducts research to improve infant health.
According to Kathleen Weaver, the public communication director for the RIA, the results of Bradizza's research will create smoking cessation treatments that will be put into practice by clinicians.
"What a lot of our scientists do is develop ways to treat issues related to addictions, and then it is handed over to treatment providers or clinicians," Weaver said. "It gives them other tools that they didn't have previously to work with when they have clients, either one-on-one or in group therapy."
According to Bradizza and Weaver, the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Office of the Director of the National Institute of Health are funding this project.
RIA scientists receive the highest percentage of federal funds of any group of scientists on the UB campus, according to Weaver.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
