Research Findings on Maternal Diet and Child Respiratory Health

The primary findings of a research done by Sara M. Mensink-Bout and colleagues don't support the notion that maternal pro-inflammatory or low-quality food in pregnancy is associated with children's respiratory disorders. These findings were published in The European Respiratory Journal.

Several serious birth malnutrition cases have been linked to a higher risk of respiratory disorders later in life, although data linking a poor diet during pregnancy to poor respiratory outcomes in infancy is mixed. As a result, this study was carried out to determine if a pro-inflammatory or low-quality maternal diet during pregnancy was connected with the respiratory health of the child.

A single participant meta-analysis was done on 18,326 mother–child pairings from seven European birth cohorts. The energy-adjusted Dietary Inflammatory Index (E-DII) and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) scores were used to quantify maternal pro-inflammatory and low-quality diets. Preschool wheeze and school-age asthma were assessed using questionnaires, while lung function was assessed using spirometry.

Key Findings

• Researchers discovered that a higher mother E-DII score (a more pro-inflammatory diet) during pregnancy was only related with a lower forced vital capacity (FVC) in children after controlling for lifestyle and sociodemographic characteristics.
• There were no linear relationships between maternal E-DII or DASH score and child wheeze or asthma.
• A very low DASH score (10th percentile) was related with a higher risk of preschool wheeze and a low forced expiratory volume in 1 s/FVC, with corresponding population attributable risk fractions of 1.7% and 3.3%, respectively, in an exploratory study of the extremes.

In conclusion, a mother's pro-inflammatory diet during pregnancy was solely linked to a lower FVC in youth. In childhood, neither the inflammatory potential nor the quality of the food were consistently linked to wheeze or asthma. The primary findings of this single participant data meta-analysis don't really support the notion that maternal pro-inflammatory or low-quality food during pregnancy is associated with children's respiratory illnesses.

Reference

Mensink-Bout, S. M., van Meel, E. R., de Jongste, J. C., Annesi-Maesano, I., Aubert, A. M., Bernard, J. Y., Chen, L.-W., Cooper, C., Crozier, S. R., Hanke, W., Harvey, N. C., Duijts, L. (2021). Maternal diet in pregnancy and child's respiratory outcomes: an individual participant data meta-analysis of 18,000 children. In European Respiratory Journal (Vol. 59, Issue 4, p. 2101315). European Respiratory Society (ERS). https://doi.org/10.1183/13993003.01315-2021