Attack of the Kids = Asthma Attack?

The more kids you have, the greater your risk of asthma says an Australian research team.

While the body of existing research on this topic holds that pregnancy can make asthma symptoms worse and interfere with how asthma meds work, this is the first study to find that pregnancy actually predisposes women to asthma.

According to a report in Maclean’s magazine, changing female hormone levels or motherhood itself may be behind the reason women are more likely than men to acquire asthma as adults.

• Mark Jenkins and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne randomly surveyed 681 Tasmanian women ages 29 to 32 who had been tested for asthma at age seven as part of a long-term health study. Women were asked about their age, smoking habits, number of pregnancies, duration of oral contraceptive use and whether they had “current asthma,” defined as asthma or “wheezy breathing” in the past 12 months.

  The likelihood of current asthma in a woman who did not have asthma as a child was 13 per cent for those with one birth, but it increased to 33 per cent for those with four births.

  “Our findings suggest the risk of asthma increases with the number of births,” says Jenkins, who is deputy director of the Centre for Genetic Epidemiology at the university. “But we cannot tell exactly whether it’s pregnancy, or birth itself, or some other factors, such as being around young children, that are the actual cause.”

Pregnancy and motherhood did not affect the asthmatic status of women who had childhood asthma.