A study by experts at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and the University of Oulu, Finland, revealed that antibiotic use during pregnancy causes childhood asthma.
The data of over 500,000 children in the Medical Birth Registry in Norway and more than 50,000 children in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) was analyzed during the study.
The study was published in the European Journal of Epidemiology.
“Maternal lower and upper respiratory tract infections and urinary tract infections showed associations with asthma at 7,” the authors explained in their findings. “Register cohort also showed an increased risk of asthma in relation to maternal antibiotics before and after pregnancy.”
“Our findings suggest that both maternal antibiotics and infections during pregnancy have a role in the risk of offspring asthma. However, results from the register cohort suggest that the effect of antibiotics may reflect the shared underlying susceptibility.”
