By Lisa Ryan
Women who take fish-oil supplements during their last three months of pregnancy reduce the risk of their child developing asthma or wheezing, a new Danish study has found.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study randomly assigned fish oil and placebos to more than 700 women in their third trimester of pregnancy. The scientists discovered that fish oil led to a nearly 31 percent reduced risk of a child developing asthma or a persistent wheeze by age three. In total, only 16.9 percent of women given fish oil had children that developed those problems within the first three years of their lives, as compared to 23.7 percent of women in the control group.
