Maternal stress and asthma

An eight-year study of nearly 14,000 children in Manitoba, Canada has found that those whose mothers were chronically stressed during their early years had a higher asthma rate than their peers regardless of their income, gender or other known risk factors. The researchers determined whether the children had current asthma at age seven by analyzing records of doctor visits, hospitalizations and medicines in the year of the child's seventh birthday and related it to maternal distress as defined by visits to the doctor, hospitalizations and medication for depression and anxiety. Even after controlling for the known risk factors of male gender, maternal asthma and urban location long-term maternal stress was still associated with an increase of nearly a third in the prevalence of childhood asthma.

You can read more about this research at

http://psychcentral.com/news/2008/01/16/mothers-stress-linked-to-childs-asthma/1791.html