Children born to mothers with a hypertensive disorder during pregnancy are no more likely to have childhood asthma than those born to mothers without the disorder, according to a new study from Stanford Health Care in Stanford, California.
A group of researchers examined data from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Maternal-Child Cohort, the largest U.S.-based study of its kind, to explore the association between preeclampsia and childhood asthma. The results were published in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
The study assessed nearly 15,000 mother-child pairs with a mean maternal age of 30.3 years at delivery. Participants included children born between 1998 and 2016. By the age of five, 14.4% of children from the total cohort had received an asthma diagnosis. Of that total, 14.3% of the children were born to mothers without pregnancy-related hypertensive disorders and 15.6% were born to mothers with one of these disorders.
“Further studies to understand prenatal risk factors for asthma development are critical to the development of effective strategies for the primary prevention of childhood asthma,” said Anna Chen Arroyo, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine.
In conclusion, researchers did not find a significant link between hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and increased odds for childhood asthma. In studying preeclampsia, in particular, researchers could not find a significant link between the disorder and a heightened likelihood for childhood asthma.
