Exercise during pregnancy can protect the child against asthma

A child’s risk of asthma can be reduced by almost half if the mother engages in active exercise at least three times a week during pregnancy, compared to a child born to a mother who is less active, according to a new study from the University of Eastern Finland. UEF), Kuopio University Hospital (KUH) and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL).

The researchers used data from nearly 1,000 mother-child pairs in the Kuopio Birth Cohort Study, KuBiCo, followed from pregnancy until the child was 7 years old.

Exercise during pregnancy is known to have positive effects on the health of both mother and child. In a previous study, physical exercise during pregnancy was also associated with improved lung function in newborns.

“This is the first time we observe a link between maternal physical exercise and the development of asthma in the child,” says doctoral researcher Emma-Reetta Musakka, BM, MSc, from the University of Eastern Finland.

Maternal physical activity and the child’s risk of asthma are related to many of the same health, lifestyle and environmental factors, such as maternal weight, stress, illness, family exercise habits, diet and, for example, owning a dog .

The current study, published in Medexplained the potential impact of these and several other similar factors on the results, but did not explain the protective association of maternal exercise with child asthma risk.

“Our findings strongly suggest that exercise during pregnancy has an independent positive effect on the fetus and on the child’s later health,” says Musakka.

Maternal exercises are known to influence fetal activity and breathing movements of the fetus, which support lung development.

“We don’t yet know why maternal exercise manifests as a reduced risk of asthma in the child, but one possibility is that it supports fetal lung maturation,” notes Musakka.

“Until now, avoiding cigarette smoke during pregnancy is one of the only effective ways to reduce a child’s risk of asthma. So it is intriguing that moderate exercise during pregnancy may have as strong a protective effect on a child’s asthma risk as if one parent has stopped smoking,” says Dr. Pirkka Kirjavainen, the lead researcher of the study.

The findings did not indicate that increasing the amount of exercise above three times a week would be associated with an even lower risk of asthma. However, further research is needed on the role of the amount and intensity of exercise during pregnancy in the prevention of asthma. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that pregnant women get about 2.5 hours of moderate exercise per week.

“The findings are promising in the field of asthma prevention. It is very encouraging to see that through reasonable amounts of exercise, mothers can significantly influence not only their own health, but also that of their child,” says Kirjavainen.