Mothers’ anxiety during pregnancy is associated with asthma in their children

Michael Calvin PA-C

miccal@ncaac.com

If you’ve seen or read The Secret, you know it discusses how our thoughts create our reality; that the reality that we possess now is only one reality. We are only limited by where we choose to go with our thoughts. The authors of this study to be published in the upcoming Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology have put a new twist on the theme. Their research shows that maternal anxiety symptoms are an indicator of stress during fetal life and may program the development of asthma during childhood. In other words, mom’s stress during pregnancy is creating the child’s reality, asthma. There is no explanation provided for how this programming effect happens. They offer some pretty detailed guesses but say that the precise mechanism still has yet to be explained.
Although the authors reported a relationship between maternal anxiety symptoms and asthma, any explanation for these findings must be viewed with some caution. They were unable to figure out the biological sources of anxiety in the women in the study and had no way to measure any biological changes to confirm anxiety had a biological effect in the children. Nevertheless, because the direct link between maternal stress and childhood asthma has been seen in this study, the next step could be to try some methods to reduce the stress and look for fewer asthmatic children as a result.
The development of relatively straightforward interventions to reduce maternal stress in pregnancy makes it possible to test these hypothetical relationships in a controlled trial. Until then, it will all remain a “secret”.

2009-04-13