A scientific study has revealed that the occupation of pregnant women can have an effect on their unborn children’s asthma risk.
Scientists from the School of Public Health in Denmark have found a link between pregnant women who work with car parts, furniture, shoes, paints or glue and an increased likelihood that their children would suffer from asthma, reports the Daily Mail.
Data was presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) annual congress in Amsterdam this week showing that women who are exposed to certain materials during their pregnancy could see knock-on health effects for their offspring.
This conclusion was reached following an assessment of 42,696 children from the Danish National Birth Cohort, which analysed asthma risk according to mothers’ exposure to low molecular weight agents.
These include synthetic chemicals and natural substances from vehicle parts, furniture, shoe soles, paints, varnish and glues, all of which can be common occupational hazards.
Professor Marc Decramer, president of the ERS, said studies of this kind “highlight the need for exposure standards, whereby all work places examine levels of allergens and respiratory irritants in their indoor air, to help prevent lung diseases”.
In July, a University College London study revealed that mothers who smoke during pregnancy are increasing their children’s risk of gastroschisis, deformed limbs, cleft palate and other birth defects.
If the workload is too high for the mothers, they can be stressed out in pregnancy which will ‘transmit’ the effect to their unborn baby as early as 17 weeks, claim scientists.
They have matched the level of stress hormones found in the mother’s blood to those in fluid surrounding the fetus.
And what’s more for this matter?
Research at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health found that cosmetologists, exposed to all the toxins in makeup and nail polishes, were almost twice as likely to have a miscarriage.
Hairdressers, touching and inhaling so many dyes and sprays, appear to be passing on risks to their unborn child. Researchers at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands found that a baby was almost four times as likely to be mentally retarded if the mother was a hairdresser who worked through certain months of her pregnancy. Of 76 children with neural tube defects, studied by two scientists in Venezuela, 13.6 percent had hairdressers for mothers. Hairdressers composed only 1.3 percent of the control group.