Stressed moms are prone to deliver babies those are having higher chances of being affected by the troublesome disease, called asthma.
According to a recent research study, conducted by some Canadian researchers, kids whose moms are chronically stressed and depressed during their early years have the higher chances of being attacked by asthma than their peers, irrespective of their income, gender any other known risk factors of asthma.
Just Go Through What Research Findings Suggest
The study suggests that the risk factor have increased by an average of 25 %. The researchers say that any persistent distress including a mother’s depression or stress can increase the risk factor that her kid will develop asthma, by an average of 25 %, even after considering the known environmental triggers.
“It is increasingly clear that traditional environmental risk factors do not fully explain the origins of asthma,” said head of the investigator team, Anita Kozyrskyj, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Manitoba, Canada.
“Evidence is emerging that exposure to maternal distress in early life plays a causal role in the development of childhood asthma. In a cohort of children born in 1995, we found that maternal distress which persists beyond the postpartum period is associated with an increased risk of asthma at school-age,” she added.
Just Check Out How the Research Was Conducted
The medical records of approximately 14000 children have been analyzed by Kozyrskyj’s team in Manitoba in 1995 who had been continuously registered with Manitoba Health Services until 2003.
They started their research by checking whether the kids have been affected by asthma at the age of 7 years by analyzing hospitalizations and medications in their 7th birthday. After doing this, they cross-checked those reports with the respective kid’s mother’s medical records including hospitalization, doctor visits and medication prescribed for depression and anxiety.
Maternal distress has been categorized into four categories considering the inception and duration into four categories. The categories are: 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, said. “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,” added Dr. Kozyrskyj.
This effect continued even after factoring in gender, income, heredity, number of siblings, and whether the kid lived in a rural or urban set up. However, the risk appears to increase for kids who belong to high-income households or who are having more than one sibling.
“Our maternal distress measure captured women who sought health care for their depression and anxiety, and thus, our findings may be limited to more severe depression and anxiety,” said Dr. Kozyrskyj.
“We plan to further explore the role of postpartum distress by doing a similar study which will link health care records with public health nurse assessments of depression and anxiety from a provincial postnatal screening program. This will enable us to assess the effects of less severe depression and anxiety during the postpartum period,” she asserted.
