Women who take fish oil supplements during the last three months of pregnancy may reduce their child’s risk of developing asthma by almost one third, a new study in Denmark has found.
The study, published in the Thursday’s issue of New England Journal of Medicine, assigned about 700 pregnant Danish women at 24 weeks of gestation to take 2.4 grams per day of either a supplement of fish oil, or a placebo of olive oil.
Then, researchers monitored the health status of children of these women for five years, which is the age asthma symptoms can be clinically established.
It turned out that 16.9 percent of the children in the fish oil group had asthma, compared to 23.7 percent in the control group, corresponding to a reduction in risk of 30.7 percent.
However, the preventive effect was seen almost exclusively in children whose mothers had low blood levels of two long-chain omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil, known as eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), at the beginning of the study. For these children, their risk of developing asthma was cut by 54 percent.
Previous research has found long-chain omega-3 fatty acids including EPA and DHA are key to regulating human immune response.
