Infantile colic, maternal smoking and infant feeding at 5 weeks of age.

BACKGROUND: Many parents seek help from health professionals because of their infants' persistent crying in the early months. The aetiology of this condition, often labelled ;;infantile colic'', is still unclear. AIMS: To assess whether smoking during pregnancy, and/or smoking at infant age 5 weeks, is associated with infantile colic, and to describe how feeding at infant age 5 weeks and smoking are related to colic. METHODS: This was a community-based study, with telephone interviews in late pregnancy, and at infant age 5 weeks, covering 1,625 mother-infant dyads, i.e. 86% of the eligible population. RESULTS: Daily maternal smoking in pregnancy was related to subsequent colic, with an age-adjusted odds ratio (OR) of 1.74 (95% confidence interval 1.08-2.82). In the multivariate model, the OR was largely unaltered. The association between smoking at infant age 5 weeks and colic did not reach statistical significance. The subgroups based on smoking and infant feeding were small, but the results suggest that exclusive breast-feeding was protective against colic, including for infants of smoking mothers. CONCLUSIONS: This study presents yet another argument why smoking in pregnancy should be discouraged - some cases of infantile colic may be avoided. With regard to mothers who are not able to give up smoking, the results add some support for the conclusion that if a mother is worried about colic, she certainly should not refrain from breast-feeding even if she smokes

A model sensitivity study for the sea-air exchange of methane in the Laptev Sea, Arctic Ocean

The ocean's sinks and sources determine the concentration of methane in the water column and by that regulating the emission of methane to the atmosphere. In this study, we investigate how sensitive the sea-air exchange of methane is to increasing/decreasing sinks and sources as well as changes of different drivers with a time-dependent biogeochemical budget model for one of the shallow shelf sea in the Siberian Arctic, the Laptev Sea. The applied changes are: increased air temperature, river discharge, wind, atmospheric methane, concentration of nutrients in the river runoff or flux of methane from the sediment. Furthermore, simulations are performed to examine how the large range in observations for methane concentration in the Lena River as well as the rate of oxidation affects the net sea-air exchange. In addition, a simulation with five of these changes applied together was carried out to simulate expected climate change at the end of this century. The result indicates that none of the simulations changed the seawater to becoming a net sink for atmospheric methane and all simulations except three increased the outgassing to the atmosphere. The three exceptions were: doubling the atmospheric methane, decreasing the rivers' concentration of methane and increasing the oxidation rate where the latter is one of the key mechanisms controlling emission of methane to the atmosphere