Daily caffeine intake during pregnancy lowers risk for asthma in children

Key takeaways:

• Higher caffeine intake during pregnancy lowered asthma risk in children through age 10.
• Further research is needed to confirm the findings, according to the researchers.

High maternal daily caffeine intake led to a lower risk for asthma in children, according to study results.

However, researchers recommended additional research to further assess the association between maternal caffeine intake and childhood asthma given “caffeine’s potential adverse effects on other health outcomes.”

Caffeine consumption

Francisca de Castro Mendes, PhD, researcher at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Porto, Portugal, and colleagues sought to assess the association between maternal caffeine intake during pregnancy and asthma risk in children by age 10 years.

Researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with women within 72 hours after giving birth and gathered information on consumption of regular and decaffeinated coffee, black and green tea, and cola beverages before and during pregnancy. They then estimated total caffeine intake (mg/day).

Researchers performed spirometry with bronchodilation on children at age 10 years and assessed medical diagnosis of asthma. They also used nonlinear least squares models to estimate knot points.

Asthma risk

The study included 5,585 mother-child pairs enrolled in a population-based birth cohort.

Researchers observed an association between high daily maternal caffeine intake and lower odds for asthma in children by age 10 years (adjusted OR = 0.6; 95% CI, 0.41-0.88).

Compared with an estimated asthma risk in children of 8.8% among mothers with no caffeine intake, the risk for asthma in children was 7.2% among mothers with an estimated knot point of 92.7 mg (95% CI, 36.3-163.3) intake of caffeine per day.

“Further studies are required to confirm our results,” the researchers wrote.