An international investigation in which researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) and the Ibs Granada Biosanitary Research Institute have participated has found that children who have been conceived using assisted reproductive techniques (ART) are more likely to develop asthma and that their risk of being asthmatic also increases when one of their parents is asthmatic or when the mother is under 30 years of age at the time of delivery.
The study evaluated the data of a group made up of 7,073 children of both sexes, who were followed from birth to 15 years of age. The results have been published in the Journal of Perinatal Medicine and have shown that babies conceived through assisted reproduction have a 1.42 higher risk of being asthmatic than babies conceived naturally.
Asthma is the most frequent chronic disease in children, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which also points out that in 2019 around 262 million people were affected by this pathology, which can even be fatal if not treated properly. The aim of the new study, which also included the participation of scientists from Canada, the United Kingdom and the Complutense University of Madrid, was to assess the perinatal and obstetric factors that may increase the risk of offspring developing asthma.
Risk of developing asthma from birth to adolescence
The researchers used statistical techniques, such as the Kaplan-Meier survival curve (a method of estimating, for each time, the probability of a subsequent event occurring) to graphically display the risk of developing asthma from early childhood through adolescence. They used data from a nationwide macro-study of people born in the UK between 2000 and 2002, called the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to assess 7,073 boys and girls from birth to 15 years of age.
“We can affirm that factors present before we are born (even before conception) will impact our health throughout our lives”
The researchers used advanced statistical techniques, such as the Kaplan-Meier survival curve (a method of estimating, for each time, the probability that an event will occur later) to graphically display the risk of developing asthma from early childhood through adolescence.
Thus, they verified that the risk of developing asthma was higher in children who were born by assisted reproductive techniques, in those with an asthmatic parent, and in those whose mother was young –under 30 years old– when the birth occurred. “In conclusion, we can affirm that factors present before we are born (even before conception) are going to impact our health throughout our lives,” declared Rafael A. Caparrós González, a researcher at the Department of Nursing at the University of Granada and one of the authors of the study.
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