Hard for you to Live without it. Harder for your Children to Live with it.

Drug use and asthma are both very common realities in the world today. Researchers from the journal of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology seem to believe that there is correlation between these two aspects of life. Kallen, Finnstrom, Nygren and Olausson conducted a study evaluating the effects that drug use during pregnancy and how it impacted the child's health. Specifically, did drug use during pregnancy increase the chances of or cause a child to develop asthma. The researchers, located in Sweden, gathered children born between 1999-2007. They then looked at the use of prescription drugs for asthma among these children between July 2005-July 2009. The use of drugs was only evaluated in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters of pregnancy. Kallen et al. also evaluated the chances of maternal asthma but eliminating cases of children who had mothers who gave birth during 1999-2007 who also received prescription drugs for asthma during July 2005-July 2011. The authors studied the subjects in terms of maternal drug use of various different drugs that included odds ratios for birth year, the mothers age BMI (body mass index), smoking and uniformity. The study showed that among the 11,000+ mothers who showed use of anti-asthmatic drugs during pregnancy, roughly 2,500 were showed to not have asthma. This left the overall rate for asthma in their children after the use of anti-asthmatics was at 2.59%. Data also presented the idea that there was a defined increase in asthma risk when mothers used drugs during the 2nd and 3rd trimesters (not including multivitamins, folic acid, iron or minerals). This data was collected for children with elimination of data of those children whose mothers had prescription for anti-asthmatics. These findings clearly imply that use of specific drugs does increase the risk of childhood asthma among offspring. One limitation of this study is found in the fact that it is impossible to eliminate all confounds from the study. There are a number of other factors that occur during pregnancy that could be increasing the chances of childhood asthma. 

Abstract

Kallen, B., Finnstrom, O., Nygren, K.G., Olausson, P.O. (2012). Maternal drug use during pregnancy and asthma risk among children. Pediatric allergy and immunology. 24, 28-32.