Reviews and feature articleProspective study of breast-feeding in relation to wheeze, atopy, and bronchial hyperresponsiveness in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)
Section snippets
ALSPAC study
We used data from the ALSPAC study (http://www.alspac.bris.ac.uk), which has been described in detail elsewhere.14 Additional information is available in the Online Repository at www.jacionline.org. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the ALSPAC Law and Ethics Committee and the Local Research Ethics Committees. The core ALSPAC sample consists of 14,541 pregnancies resulting in a cohort of 14,062 live births. Of these, 13,988 children were alive at 1 year of age. For reasons of
Results
Approximately 25% of the children in the ALSPAC cohort were never breast-fed, 25% were breast-fed for at least 6 months, and approximately 8.5% were exclusively breast-fed for at least 4 months (see Table E1). Participation in the clinic visits at age 7 years for skin prick testing and age 8 years for bronchial responsiveness testing was higher among children who had been breast-fed, had older siblings, had less postnatal exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, or had mothers who were older,
Discussion
In this large prospective study with objective outcome measures at ages 7 and 8 years and extensive data on potential confounders and effect modifiers, we found no evidence that breast-feeding increased the risk of later wheeze, asthma diagnosis, atopy, or BHR. We found no evidence of deleterious effects of breast-feeding either in the dataset as a whole or in subsets defined by parental atopy, child atopy, sex, family size, various combinations of these factors, or other risk factors in these
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2021, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In PracticeCitation Excerpt :Despite these benefits, the influence of breastfeeding on asthma prevalence in childhood is less clear and findings within the literature remain inconsistent. Previous studies investigating this relationship have illustrated a protective effect,3-10 no effect,11-15 or even an increased risk of asthma with prolonged duration of breastfeeding.16,17 Although the most recent meta-analysis of 42 articles demonstrated an overall modest protective effect (pooled odds ratio, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.82-0.95), the authors acknowledged the low-quality nature of this result given substantial heterogeneity between studies.18
Prospective Cohort Study of Breastfeeding and the Risk of Childhood Asthma
2018, Journal of PediatricsPerinatal factors and the development of childhood asthma
2018, Annals of Allergy, Asthma and ImmunologyCitation Excerpt :Many experts also believe that oxygen therapy is associated with the development of respiratory diseases such as asthma.34,35 In the present study, breastfeeding demonstrated a strong preventive effect in the development of asthma, and this is consistent with previous studies.33,36–38 Breastfeeding has been shown to decrease the number of clinically significant respiratory tract infections in infants and therefore would be expected to decrease wheezing associated with infection.
The UK Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the University of Bristol provide core support for ALSPAC. The analysis was supported by the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, USA.
Disclosure of potential conflict of interest: The authors have declared that they have no conflict of interest.