May 16, 2018 - 18:05 AMT
Researchers find way to reduce asthma attacks in pregnant women

A long-term study managing asthma during pregnancy has found a way to halve the rates of asthma attacks for expectant mothers, while paving the way for asthma prevention in their children, ABC News reports.

Catherine Rosser, who participated in the study, has wheezed through life since she was a child, but was not diagnosed with asthma until she was in her twenties.

"At first I didn't know what was happening. I thought, am I having panic attack?" she said.

"I felt like perhaps at some point when I'd get it quite badly, I thought I might die."

Children whose mothers have asthma are more likely to develop the condition themselves, but Rosser's son is asthma-free.

"They [the researchers] said that his breathing capabilities and his lung capacity and function and functionality was extremely good," she explained.

"And that he definitely had no signs of being asthmatic at all."

When Rosser was pregnant with her son 10 years ago, she was part of a trial run by the Hunter Medical Research Institute and the University of Newcastle, looking at asthma management during pregnancy.

"Asthma in pregnancy affects around 10–12 per cent of pregnant women in Australia," Vanessa Murphy, one of the study's key researchers from the University of Newcastle, said.

"And I don't think we take that seriously enough because it can have major impacts on the health of both the mother and the baby.

The researchers gave one group a traditional asthma management plan, so expectant mums were medicated based on their symptoms, such as coughing or wheezing.

Rosser was put in the second group.

"What we tested was a strategy where we measured lung inflammation, using a simple breath test, and we used the results of the breath test to determine how much medication the woman should be using and we adjusted her medication each month," Dr Murphy said.

"What we found was this approach significantly reduced the rate of asthma attacks in pregnancy by half.

"And what we've done in this study is followed up the children when they were four to six years old, and looked at how many of them had asthma and we find again, almost a 50 per cent reduction in doctor-diagnosed asthma in pre-school aged children."

The study also found that for those children who did develop asthma, they presented less often to emergency departments for asthma attacks and needed less medication to relieve their symptoms.