Kids delivered by emergency caesarean have high incidence of Asthma

Children delivered by emergency cesarean section (CS) had a higher chance of being diagnosed with asthma, says an article published in Clinical and Experimental Allergy Journal.

According to prior studies, a cesarean section might cause an infant's digestive flora to become disrupted, which can result in the formation of allergies. Other research, however, have refuted these findings, claiming that there is no connection between the technique of birth and asthma, particularly teenage asthma. Thereby, Amy O'Connor and colleagues reasoned that if a connection between CS and asthma exists because of a change in the newborn intestinal microbiota, then the current investigation would find evidence of such a connection.

This study used data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study to examine the relationship between the mode of birth and asthma development at ages 7, 11, or 14, persistent asthma, and teenage onset asthma. When children were 9 months old, information on the method of delivery was gathered. The types of deliveries included spontaneous vaginal birth, assisted vaginal birth, induced vaginal birth, emergency cesarean section, planned cesarean section, and cesarean section following induction of labor. The variable's purpose was to compare the impact of any intervention on labor to that of none.

The key findings of this study were:

1. The association between asthma at ages 7, 11, and 14 and emergency C-section was one of the main conclusions.

2. There were not many links found between aided and induced vaginal birth and asthma at age 11 or between induced vaginal birth and wheeze at age 7.

3. The other main conclusion was the assessment of the link between planned C-section and asthma; following simple and modified model analyses, researchers found no relationships.

4. According to the study letter, one of the possible causes of the favorable connections might be a change in the infant's gut ecology after a C-section.

5. Investigators underlined that the anticipation in that case, nevertheless, was connected to a scheduled C-section.

Children delivered by emergency CS, but not planned CS, had a higher chance of being diagnosed with asthma. These findings imply that the link is unlikely to be causal according to the microbiome hypothesis and may be caused by residual confounding variables or confounding by indication.

Reference: 

O’Connor, A., McCarthy, F. P., Kelly, L., Khashan, A. S., & Maher, G. M. (2023). Mode of delivery and asthma in childhood and adolescence: Findings from the Millennium Cohort Study. In Clinical & Experimental Allergy. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1111/cea.14282