How to prevent asthma since pregnancy
The risks of the child developing allergies during childhood are a result of certain habits that occur during pregnancy such as smoking, stress or poor diet. Currently, 12 percent of the school-age child population suffers from asthma and between 800,000 and a million children have some type of allergy, according to the data of the Spanish Society of Clinical Immunology, Allergology and Pediatric Asthma (SEICAP). Some data that are increased by bad habits during pregnancy.
Tips to prevent childhood asthma since pregnancy
Tobacco and contamination during pregnancy are two of the main prenatal risk factors for the development of asthma and allergies during childhood, according to the SEICAP. Thus, smoking during pregnancy can multiply by two, or even three, the chances of developing asthma during childhood.
Therefore, professionals recommend carrying out a series of good habits during pregnancy in order to stop the onset of allergic diseases in children:
- Follow a healthy diet during pregnancy
- Reduce stress during pregnancy
- Avoid exposure to traffic pollution, especially at rush hour.
- Extend breastfeeding until 6 months
In this same line and focused on the influence of pollution on children, a Spanish study, conducted by several centers and published in the journal Thorax, has confirmed that "prenatal exposure to air pollution related to traffic can lead to to a long-term lung function deficit in the preschool age. "
Second-hand smoke increases the risk of asthma in childhood
Besides the habit of smoking in pregnancy, something that 35 percent of pregnant women do all over the world, the Swedish research published in the magazine Pediatrics has pointed out that exposure to secondhand smoke, both at the time the baby is in the womb and during childhood, can also cause the child to develop asthma up to, even, 16 years of age. Thus, while the risk of suffering from asthma and rhinitis is linked especially to early childhood, eczema usually develops at later ages.
Diet and stress in pregnancy increase the risk of asthma in children
Apart from tobacco and pollution, there are other factors that can affect the health of the child during pregnancy. One of these factors is feeding: a pregnant woman must responsibly control her diet including all the nutrients in her daily diet and comply with the restrictions that pregnancy requires. In this sense, the latest data indicate that, for example, the Mediterranean diet acts as a protector against asthma.
Finally, it has been proven that suffering stress during pregnancy, added to the genetic predisposition to suffer from asthma, increases the risk that the child will suffer from asthma later.
Patricia Núñez de Arenas
