Essential Concepts for Healthy Living, Essay Example

Health Care                                                   

The impact of prenatal health care is of great concern. To aid in identifying conditions and behaviors resulting in low birth weight babies’ early and continuous prenatal care is necessary. Factors resulting in low birth weight babies include smoking, drug, and alcohol abuse, gaining too much or too little weight during pregnancy, and getting pregnant within six months or less of giving birth. Mothers who do not receive any prenatal care are three times more likely to have low birth weight babies, and their babies are five times more likely to die than mothers who received prenatal care.

Problem Statements

Exposure of unborn infants to cigarette smoke and alcohol by the mother during the pregnancy period has a number of health and disease risks directly related to the mortality of the newborn baby. Maternal alcohol and smoking alter autonomic nervous system function. Newborns whose mothers had smoked cigarettes during pregnancy had a markedly slower heartbeat than other babies did while they slept. Infants whose mother’s had consumed alcohol during pregnancy had a lowered heart rate compared to global results. This was only noted during active sleep. Infants who are not exposed to alcohol and smoking have an increased heart rate when it came to tilting their heads up and a lowered heart rate when their heads were tilted down. Infants who had been exposed to alcohol and smoking did not show any significant changes showing that some physiological changes had been made to the nervous and cardiac systems. In essence, autonomic function has been unalterably changed during the pregnancy period where trace amounts of alcohol and nicotine among other toxic chemicals were introduced into the systems of the still developing infants.

Purpose Statement

Smoking slows down the rate at which the fetus grows in the uterus. Birth weight of the infants is reduced by 8 to 10% in babies born to smokers as compared to babies born to non-smokers. It has been reported consistently and accurately that excluding all other factors such as diet, access to healthcare, level of attention received and all other controlling factors, women who smoke cigarettes are twice as likely to deliver a child with low birth weight. Underweight babies and babies whose development was compromised by smoking and alcohol consumption are placed at a higher risk of contracting SIDS, pneumonia, and ear infections. Other side effects include mental retardation and a lowered mental capacity, which makes learning difficult for the infant.

References

Alters, S., & Schiff, W. (2009). Essential concepts for healthy living. Sudbury, Mass: Jones and Bartlett.

Briggs, G. G., Freeman, R. K., & Yaffe, S. J. (2011). Drugs in pregnancy and lactation: A reference guide to fetal and neonatal risk. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Cohen, W. R. (2012). Complications of pregnancy. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Medical.

Farenga, S. J., Ness, D., & Thomson Gale (Firm). (2005). Encyclopedia of education and human development. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe.

Hockenberry, M. J., Wong, D. L., Wilson, D., & Wong, D. L. (2013). Wong’s nursing care of infants and children. St. Louis, Mo: Elsevier Mosby.