When pregnant women take an antibiotic in the second or third trimester, the child has a higher risk of childhood obesity at age 7, according to a recent study from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
The study, published in the International Journal of Obesity, is the first reporting that maternal antibiotic use can increase the risk of childhood obesity. Data is based on information from healthy, non-smoking pregnant women in New York between 1998 and 2006. Of the 727 women in the study, 436 were followed until their children turned 7, and 16 percent of those women used antibiotics in their second or third trimester.
Those children had an 84 percent higher risk of obesity compared to children not exposed to antibiotics in that timeframe.
"Our findings should not discourage antibiotic use when they are medically needed, but it is important to recognize that antibiotics are currently overprescribed," said Noel Mueller, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Mailman School of Public Health.