WEDNESDAY, Dec. 3, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Women with an eating disorder are more likely to have children who suffer from asthma and wheezing, a new study says.

Eating disorders are associated with a 26% increased risk of school-age asthma and a 25% higher risk of preschool wheeze, researchers reported Dec. 2 in the journal Thorax.

This increased risk persisted even after researchers accounted for other mental health problems like depression or anxiety, and regardless of the type of eating disorder a woman suffered, researchers found.

Assessment for eating disorders should be part of prenatal health care, the researchers argue.

“There is a need to include maternal eating disorders in research on early-life respiratory risk factors and to integrate eating disorder screening and support into maternal healthcare to improve respiratory outcomes in offspring,” concluded the research team led by Maja Popovic, a researcher in epidemiology with the University of Turin in Italy.

For the new study, researchers pooled data from seven earlier European studies involving nearly 131,500 mother/child pairs.

Between 1% and 17% of the women had an eating disorder before pregnancy, depending on the study, researchers said.

Likewise, between 2% and nearly 18% of their children suffered from school-age asthma and 21% to nearly 50% with preschool wheezing,

All told, eating disorders were linked to an increased risk of asthma and wheeze among the children, researchers found.

The study wasn’t designed to determine a cause-and-effect relationship, but could only show a potential association, researchers noted.

However, the team speculated that eating disorders and the associated stress might affect the lung development of a gestating fetus, given that they have already been associated with an increased risk of low birth weight and premature delivery.

“The mechanisms underlying the associations between maternal mental health and childhood respiratory outcomes remain unclear,” researchers wrote.

More information

The National Eating Disorders Association has more on pregnancy and eating disorders.

SOURCES: BMJ, news release, Dec. 2, 2025; Thorax, Dec. 2, 2025