| Summary: | The aim of this project was to evaluate the effect of intensive individual anti-smoking counselling
among pregnant women from a Polish urban community with a large representation of socially
underprivileged women. The study was conducted between 1 December 2000 and 31 December 2001. Out
of 204 women who were asked to take part in a midwives-assisted program of educational counselling to
stop smoking, 152 (74.5%) agreed to participate. The intervention program included four visits of a midwife
trained in smoking cessation techniques to the home of a smoking pregnant woman. The control
group were 145 pregnant women who on the first visit to a maternity unit received only a standard written
information on the health risk from maternal smoking to the foetus. The percentage of pregnant women
who quitted smoking during the project was 46.1% in the intervention group and 23.4% among the controls
(p < 0.001). After combining the intervention group with the women who refused to participate in
the project, the rate of quitting was 36.3%, still significantly higher than in controls (p = 0.01). The
strongest influence of the intervention was found among women smoking more than 5 cigarettes/day.
Women covered by the intervention programme, who reported smoking in previous pregnancies, were
found to quit smoking to a much higher extent than the controls with a similar background. Such pattern
was also observed for women whose husbands were smokers. The benefits of the intervention, especially
for the socially underprivileged women, seem to result from an increased proportion of subjects who
undertook a quitting attempt, rather than the effectiveness of these attempts. In the intervention group,
among the subjects who did not manage to quit smoking during pregnancy, the number of women who at
least slightly reduced their smoking rate was twice as high as in the controls.
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