OBJECTIVE:To assess the effect of exposition to tobacco's smoke on infants' growth. METHODS:A cross-sectional population-based study was carried out with infants up to two years old who went to public primary healthcare units for immunization. Ten units with 200 infants each were randomly selected. The parents or people in charge of 1,437 children answered a questionnaire. Weight and length were measured before the immunization. For multivariate analysis two models were built, whose dependent variable were the continuous ones, weight-for-age and length-for-age, which were built using the conceptual hierarchical modeling. RESULTS:Prevalence of low-length was 4.7%, and of low-weight was 3.0%. Among all children in the study, 35.8% were exposed to cigarette smoking of people in the household. After adjustments for socio-demographic variables and biological variables of the child, only the mother's smoking showed independent effect on the nutritional status of children, where the smoking habits during pregnancy remained associated with length-for-age (β=-0.226; p=0.02) and smoking of the mother with weight-for-age (β=-0.235; p=0.02). The smoking of the father and other people in the household's smoking did not present statistically significant association for any studied outcomes. CONCLUSION:Smoking during pregnancy showed independent effect on the length-for-age indicator and mother's smoking with weight-for-age of infants.
Nutrition assessment; Malnutrition; Epidemiology; Cross-sectional studies; Infant; Smoking
