Maternal socioeconomic and lifestyle factors during pregnancy and the risk of congenital heart defects.

Unlabelled: The objective of study was to estimate the importance of maternal socioeconomic and lifestyle factors during pregnancy in the risk of congenital heart defects in Kaunas infant population in 1999-2005.

Material And Methods: An epidemiological case-control study was conducted. The study comprised 187 newborns with congenital heart defects (cases) and 643 randomly selected newborns without any defects (controls), born in Kaunas city during 1999-2005. Modern epidemiological methods were used for data analysis. A multivariate logistic regression was used to determine adjusted risk factors of congenital heart defects.

Results: The logistic multivariate regression analysis showed that low and moderate maternal education significantly increased the risk of congenital heart defects (primary or basic [OR=3.43; 95% CI, 1.54-7.64] and secondary [OR=1.56; 95% CI, 1.00-2.45] vs advanced vocational or higher education). The housewives and workers had a higher risk of delivering a newborn with congenital heart defects than the office workers (OR=2.34; 95% CI, 1.34-4.10 and OR=1.28; 95% CI, 0.79-2.07, respectively). Maternal smoking during pregnancy tended to increase the risk of congenital heart defects by 48% (OR=1.48; 95% CI, 0.82-2.67).

Conclusions: According to our study results, unfavorable maternal socioeconomic factors and smoking during pregnancy increased the risk of congenital heart defects.