Obesity during pregnancy can lead to a higher chance of a child developing asthma.
According to a new study, the chances of children developing asthma can still be determined while being carried in their mothers. Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburg have discovered that children who have mothers who are obese during pregnancy are much more likely to have asthma or other breathing difficulties than those carried by mothers who weigh less.
The study was lead by Dr. Erick Forno, whose team studied the past cases of women of all sizes who had given birth within the last two decades, and whether or not the children had developed asthma between age one all the way through age 16. What they found was excess weight gain during the pregnancy resulted in a 16 percent higher chance of the child having asthma during their lifetime. Obesity, however, increased those odds to 20 to 30 percent.
While Forno and the other researchers were able to find this correlation, they were not able to discover what exactly links extreme weight to asthma. Forno has hypothesized that the inflammation associated in a person who is obese could somehow have a direct impact on the developing lungs and airways in the baby. Having less room for the development could be what is causing the breathing difficulties in the children with obese mothers.
“It is also important to have adequate weight management and healthy nutrition during pregnancy, because excessive weight gain [during pregnancy] also increases the risk of childhood asthma. This is of course in addition to all the other benefits of a healthy weight and diet,” Forno wrote in his report, which was published in the August issue of the medial journal Pediatrics.
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