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Pregnancy and asthma

Pregnant women with asthma are likely to experience worse symptoms if they are carrying a girl, a new study finds.

In the past, doctors treating asthmatics who were pregnant noticed what seemed to be a link between how well their patients did and the sex of their children. To see if this was the case, researchers for this study, published in The American Journal of Epidemiology, taught about 700 pregnant women with asthma how to measure their lung function with handheld air-flow meters.

The researchers, led at Yale by Helen L. Kwon, now at Columbia, asked the women to monitor their breathing twice daily for 10 days at various points in their pregnancies and to record the results. Overall, the researchers found, the women in the study followed the expected pattern. First their asthma improved after they became pregnant, then it grew worse, and then, late in pregnancy, it improved again. But the women carrying girls tended to do worse. Those carrying boys on average had 10 percent better lung function.

The researchers offered several possible explanations: The testosterone released by male foetuses may relax lung tissue. Or, female foetuses may set off a process that irritates the lungs of asthma patients. From a practical standpoint, the findings probably mean little for how doctors should treat pregnant patients with asthma, said the senior author of the study, Michael B. Bracken of Yale.

Bracken wrote in an e-mail message, ``The importance of the observation lies more with pointing to possible new biological mechanisms that may eventually suggest new ways of therapeutically managing asthma.''

(NYT)

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