Suboptimal maternal diet not associated with respiratory diseases in children

A suboptimal maternal diet, defined as pro-inflammatory or low quality, during pregnancy did not play an important role in the development of respiratory diseases in children, researchers reported in European Respiratory Journal.

The researchers performed a meta-analysis that included 18,326 mother-child pairs from seven European birth cohorts from the U.K., France, the Netherlands, Ireland and Poland. Researchers estimated maternal pro-inflammatory and low-quality diets using energy-adjusted Dietary Inflammatory Index (E-DII) and DASH scores and collected children’s preschool wheezing and school-age asthma using questionnaires and lung function.

Fifty-two percent of children had preschool wheezing and 15.6% had school-age asthma.

During pregnancy, a higher maternal E-DII score was associated with lower FVC in children after adjusting for lifestyle and sociodemographic factors (z score difference, –0.05; 95% CI, –0.08 to –0.02). A very low DASH score (< 10th percentile) was associated with an increased risk for preschool wheezing (OR = 1.2; 95% CI, 1.06-1.36) and a low FVC (OR = 1.17; 95% CI, 1-1.39). In addition, a very low DASH score resulted in a corresponding population attributable risk fraction of 1.7% for preschool wheezing, 3.3% for low FVC and 1.4% for asthma, according to the results.

Researchers reported no linear association between children’s wheezing and maternal E-DII score (OR = 1.14; 95% CI, 1.09-1.2) or DASH score (OR = 1.15; 95% CI, 1.1-1.21). There was also no linear association between school-age asthma and maternal E-DII score (OR = 1.07; 95% CI, 1-1.15) or DASH score (OR = 1.16; 95% CI, 1.08-1.24).

“A more pro-inflammatory diet of mothers during pregnancy was only related to a lower FVC in childhood. Both the inflammatory potential and quality of the diet were not consistently related to wheezing or asthma in childhood. The main results from this individual participant data meta-analysis do not support the hypothesis that maternal pro-inflammatory or low-quality diet in pregnancy are related to respiratory diseases in childhood,” Sara M. Mensink-Bout, MD, from the Generation R Study Group and the department of pediatrics in the division of respiratory medicine and allergology at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues wrote.