Prenatal Pollution Exposure and Asthma Development in Children

How does prenatal exposure to pollution affect the development of childhood asthma? Dr Sonali Bose, MD, MPH, discusses how she recruited pregnant women and studied their exposure to nitrate pollution over their pregnancy.

"We found that being exposed to nitrate air pollution increases children's risk of having asthma in childhood, but particularly for those children who have exposure to high maternal stress during pregnancy as well as those children who are boys," Bose said.

It's not just pollution that's important - there are other factors at play, like stress and sex, Bose and colleagues found.