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Background: Evidence on the effect of maternal complications in pregnancy on wheezing in offspring is still insufficient.Methods: A pooled analysis was performed on individual participant data from fourteen European birth cohorts to assess the relationship between several maternal pregnancy complications and wheezing symptoms in the offspring.Exposures of interest included hypertension and preeclampsia, diabetes, as well as pre-pregnancy overweight (body mass index between 25 and 29.9) and obesity (body mass index ≥30) compared with normal weight (body mass index between 18.5 and 24.9). Outcomes included both ever and recurrent wheezing from birth up to 12–24 months of age.Cohort-specific crude and adjusted risk ratios (RR) were calculated using log-binomial regression models and then pooled using a random effects model.Results: The study included 85 509 subjects. Cohort-specific prevalence of ever wheezing varied from 20.0% to 47.3%, and of recurrent wheezing from 3.0% to 14.3%. Adjusted pooled RR for ever and recurrent wheezing were: 1.02 (95% CI: 0.98–1.06) and 1.20 (95% CI: 0.98–1.47) for hypertensive disorders; 1.09 (95% CI: 1.01–1.18) and 1.23 (95% CI: 1.07–1.43) for preeclampsia; 1.04 (95% CI: 0.97–1.13) and 1.24 (95% CI: 0.86–1.79) for diabetes; 1.08 (95% CI: 1.05–1.11) and 1.19 (95% CI: 1.12–1.26) for overweight; 1.12 (95% CI: 1.08–1.17) and 1.16 (95% CI: 0.97–1.39) for obesity. No heterogeneity was found in RR estimates among the cohorts, except for diabetes and recurrent wheezing (P = 0.027).Conclusions: Preeclampsia, maternal pre-pregnancy overweight and obesity are associated with an increase risk of wheezing in the offspring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Several studies found an association between early administration of paracetamol and antibiotics and development of wheezing. This could be due to confounding: wheeze and asthmatic symptoms in early childhood are difficult to distinguish from respiratory tract infections that are widely treated with these drugs; in case of persistence of symptoms up to school age, this could explain the observed relationship.Methods We investigated the association between paracetamol and antibiotics use in the first year of life and wheezing phenotypes, i.e. wheezing starting in different time periods (early, persistent and late-onset) in the SIDRIA-2 study, a cross-sectional survey of 16 933 children aged 6–7 years. Directed acyclic graph (DAG) was used to depict the causal structure.Results Paracetamol and antibiotics administration in the first year were associated with early wheezing (first 2 years of life only) [odds ratio (OR): 2.27; 95% confidence interval (95% CI): 1.98–2.62 and OR = 3.76, 95% CI: 3.31–4.27] and with persistent wheezing (first 2 years + last 12 months) (OR = 1.77, 95% CI: 1.49–2.10 and OR = 3.06, 95% CI: 2.60–3.60), whereas the association with late-onset wheezing (in the last 12 months only) was weak (OR = 1.12, 95% CI: 0.97–1.31 and OR = 1.18, 95% CI: 1.02–1.38 for paracetamol and antibiotics, respectively). DAG shows that even in the absence of a direct (causal) arrow from early drugs use to wheezing at school age, the two are associated due to confounding (through the ‘infection’ node).Conclusions It is important to take into account different phenotypes in order to disentangle the association of paracetamol and antibiotics with wheezing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]