Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy not linked to childhood asthma

Key takeaways:

• The likelihood for childhood asthma was not heightened with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.
• Maternal preeclampsia also did not raise the odds for asthma in children.

Children born to mothers with a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy are not more likely to have childhood asthma than those born to mothers without the disorder, according to a research letter.

“To our knowledge, this is the largest U.S.-based maternal-child cohort to examine the relation of [hypertensive disorders of pregnancy] to asthma,” Anna Chen Arroyo, MD, MPH, medical director of the allergy, asthma and immunodeficiency clinic at Stanford Health Care, and colleagues wrote in Annals of the American Thoracic Society.

In this study, Arroyo and colleagues assessed 14,929 mother-child pairs (mean maternal age at delivery, 30.3 years; 50.3% non-Hispanic white) from the Massachusetts General Hospital Maternal-Child Cohort, which included children born between 1998 and 2016, to determine the relationship between hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and the odds for childhood asthma.

This relationship was found through logistic regression models that accounted for maternal and child factors.

At the point of turning 5 years old, 2,153 children (14.4%) from the total cohort had received an asthma diagnosis, and this included 1,975 (14.3%) born to mothers without hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (n = 13,790) and 178 (15.6%) born to mothers with one of these disorders (n = 1,139).

Within the cohort of children with asthma born to mothers with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, researchers observed that 92 (14.7%) had a mother with preeclampsia, a rare maternal disorder (n = 624).

Researchers did not find a significant link between hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and increased odds for childhood asthma.

Looking specifically at preeclampsia, researchers again failed to find a significant link between this disorder and a heightened likelihood for asthma.

“Further studies to understand prenatal risk factors for asthma development are critical to the development of effective strategies for the primary prevention of childhood asthma,” Arroyo and colleagues wrote.