Little is known about how prenatal maternal stress (PNMS) influences risks of asthma in humans. In this small study, we sought to determine whether disaster-related PNMS would predict asthma risk in children. In June 1998, we assessed severity of objective hardship and subjective distress in women pregnant during the January 1998 Quebec Ice Storm. Lifetime asthma symptoms, diagnoses, and corticosteroid utilization were assessed when the children were 12 years old (N = 68). No effects of objective hardship or timing of the exposure were found. However, we found that, in girls only, higher levels of prenatal maternal subjective distress predicted greater lifetime risk of wheezing (OR = 1.11; 90% CI = 1.01-1.23), doctor-diagnosed asthma (OR = 1.09; 90% CI = 1.00-1.19), and lifetime utilization of corticosteroids (OR = 1.12; 90% CI = 1.01-1.25). Other perinatal and current maternal life events were also associated with asthma outcomes. Findings suggest that stress during pregnancy opens a window for fetal programming of immune functioning. A sex-based approach may be useful to examine how prenatal and postnatal environments combine to program the immune system. This small study needs to be replicated with a larger, more representative sample.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 20 January 2015.
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#16,048,009
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#4,469
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#132,094
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Outputs of similar age from BioMed Research International
#294
of 673 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,374,917 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 34th percentile – i.e., 34% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 10,759 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 5.6. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 56% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 673 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 54% of its contemporaries.
