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Mothers' Stress May Increase Children's Asthma |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: "Evidence is emerging that exposure to maternal distress in early life plays a causal role in the development of childhood asthma. The findings appeared in the second issue for January of the American Journal or Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society. Dr. Kozyrskyj and her colleagues 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 determined whether the children had current asthma at age seven by analyzing records of doctor visits, hospitalizations and medications in the year of the child's seventh birthday, and related it to maternal distress as defined by doctor visits, hospitalizations and medication for depression and anxiety. Maternal distress was categorized according to onset and duration into four categories: no distress, postpartum distress only, short-term distress and long-term distress. "Unlike existing studies that have measured maternal stress during the first few years only, the longitudinal nature of our health care study enabled us to characterize maternal distress over time to identify whether it continued," said Dr. Kozyrskyj. Even after controlling for the known risk factors of male gender, maternal asthma, urban location and total health care visits, long-term maternal stress was associated with an increase of nearly a third in the prevalence childhood asthma. This is the first study of a non-high-risk cohort of children to report an association with childhood asthma.
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