Mothers who are exposed to particular agents during pregnancy could give birth to children with a higher risk of asthma, according to new research. The study was presented at the European Respiratory Society’s Annual Congress in Amsterdam. It is well known that when people are exposed to certain substances and chemicals it can cause asthma…

Eating low-fat yoghurt whilst pregnant can increase the risk of your child developing asthma and allergic rhinitis (hay fever), according to recent findings. The study will be presented at the European Respiratory Society’s (ERS) Annual Congress in Amsterdam on 25 September 2011. All the abstracts for the ERS Congress are publicly available online…

To help reduce asthma exacerbations during pregnancy, a new treatment algorithm has been designed by investigators in Australia…

Children with severe asthma are 3.6 times more likely to have been exposed to tobacco smoking before birth even without later exposure than children with a mild form of the disease, according to a multicenter study led by researchers at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)…

A study published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health suggests, women who are overweight or obese when they get pregnant may be programming their children to have asthma-like respiratory symptoms during adolescence. Since the 1970s, the frequency of children with asthma has risen dramatically worldwide, and up to 37% of teenagers may have symptoms…

Women with high exposure to magnetic fields during pregnancy may have a higher risk of asthma in their children, according to a Kaiser Permanente study appearing online in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine…

Use of vitamin D supplements during pregnancy has long been a matter of concern but now researchers writing in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research report that even a high supplementation amount in healthy pregnant women was safe and effective in raising circulating vitamin D to a level thought by some to be optimal…

A dietary supplement containing an amino acid and antioxidant vitamins, given to pregnant women at high risk of pre-eclampsia, can reduce the occurrence of the disease, finds a study published on bmj.com today. Pre-eclampsia is a serious condition where abnormally high blood pressure and other disturbances develop during pregnancy…

Children whose mothers or grandmothers smoked during pregnancy are at increased risk of asthma in childhood, but the underlying causes of this are not well understood. Now a new study indicates changes in a process called DNA methylation that occurs before birth may be a root cause. The study will be presented at the ATS 2011 International Conference…

A National Institutes of Health study has found that progesterone, a naturally occurring hormone, reduced the rate of preterm birth before the 33rd week of pregnancy by 45 percent among one category of at risk women. The women in the study had a short cervix, which is known to increase the risk for preterm birth. The cervix is the part of the uterus that opens and shortens during labor…