Kids with stressed out moms more prone to asthma

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Children whose mothers are stressed are at higher risk for asthma, Canadian researchers said on Tuesday.

They said persistent distress such as a mother's depression or anxiety can increase the risk that her child will develop asthma by an average of 25 percent, even after accounting for known environmental triggers.

"It is increasingly clear that traditional environmental risk factors do not fully explain the origins of asthma," said Anita Kozyrskyj of the University of Manitoba in Canada.

Kozyrskyj's team analyzed the medical records of nearly 14,000 children born in Manitoba in 1995 who were continuously registered with Manitoba Health Services until 2003.

They checked to see whether the children had asthma at age 7 by analyzing doctor visits, hospitalizations and medications in the year of their 7th birthday.

They cross-checked this with the mother's medical records, including doctor visits, hospitalizations and medication for depression and anxiety. And they ranked the mother's distress by the duration of treatment: no distress, postpartum distress only, short-term distress and long-term distress.

"We found that maternal distress which persists beyond the postpartum period is associated with an increased risk of asthma at school-age," Kozyrskyj, whose study appears in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, said in a statement.

This effect persisted even after factoring in income, gender, number of siblings, heredity and whether the child lived in an urban or rural setting.

The risk appeared to intensify for children in high-income households or who had more than one sibling.

More here: http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKN1550724520080115?sp=true