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WEDNESDAY, Oct. 18 (HealthDay News) -- The way a healthy infant's lungs function at birth may provide clues to that child's future respiratory health, concludes a new study from Norway.
The study found that babies who performed poorly on lung function tests at birth were more likely to develop asthma before the age of 10.
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"The study tells us that some children who later have asthma, breathe abnormally already at birth," said one of the study's authors, Dr. Geir Haland, a research fellow and assistant consultant at Ulleval University Hospital in Oslo. "Thus we may infer from this that the disease process of asthma may express itself through lung function [tests a] long time before symptoms appear and that, in some children, it may appear that the disease process is established already before birth."
The study findings are published in the Oct. 19 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
About 20 million Americans -- nine million of them children -- have been diagnosed with asthma, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI). Between 1980 and 1994, the rate of childhood asthma increased by 160 percent. Children miss nearly 13 million school days annually due to the disease.
There's no way to know ahead of time which children will develop asthma, although a family history indicates a higher risk.
To assess whether or not lung function at the time of birth indicates a higher risk of developing asthma during childhood, the Norwegian researchers recruited 616 children who were 10 years old. All of these children had been given lung-function tests shortly after they were born. All were born full-term and appeared healthy.
At 10, their parents agreed to a thorough asthma evaluation that included lung function tests, a test designed to measure airway response to an irritant, blood samples and allergy testing.
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