The research by scientists from the University of Crete in Greece, found that a diet rich in fruit and vegetables gave protection from such conditions to their babies.
The research team studied 468 mothers and their children from pregnancy to six-and-a-half years after the birth and found that asthma and allergies were significantly less common in children whose mothers ate lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts and fish during pregnancy.
They also found that eating high levels of red meat, such as three to four times a week, increased the risk.
At a time when more and more children in the developed world are suffering from asthma and other allergies the study is particularly significant.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), asthma is the most common chronic disease among children; the WHO says 300 million people suffer from asthma and 255,000 people died of asthma in 2005.
The same research team had already found in a previous study that children who ate a Mediterranean diet appeared to be protected from asthma and allergies but this latest research indicates that the protective effect of the Mediterranean diet may begin even earlier.
The researchers found that by the time the children were six-and-a-half years old their diet appeared to have little impact on their risk of asthma and allergy, but their mother's diet during pregnancy appeared to be much more important.
The best results in terms of protection, occurred when vegetables were eaten more than eight times a week, fish more than three times a week, and legumes more than once a week.
The researchers suggest the Mediterranean diet is well balanced and rich in foods which contained beneficial vitamins and minerals and is also high in antioxidants which help to keep tissues, including those in the lungs, healthy.
They say the fatty acids from fish also help reduce potentially damaging inflammation.
The research is published in the journal Thorax.
In the future, the researchers would also like to probe more deeply the DNA that surrounds the 18 genomic regions identified in the Nature Genetics study. These findings give us insight into the genetic architecture of quantitative traits like blood lipid levels, but we think that our findings may underestimate the impact of these regions, said Kathiresan. If we look closer, we may find even more SNPs nearby that contribute to cholesterol inheritance.
Another motive for this work is to eventually give physicians the ability to predict whether a patient will develop high cholesterol. Today, patients are often older and have had high cholesterol for several years before they are given a cholesterol-lowering drug. With a more complete knowledge of the genetic triggers, physicians may be able to identify high-risk patients at an earlier stage and use cholesterol-lowering drugs to prevent future damage to blood vessels.
The current study builds upon the Diabetes Genetics Initiative of the Broad Institute, Lund University, and Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, a pioneering study of the genetics of type 2 diabetes that found three new genomic regions influencing type 2 diabetes risk, published in Science last year. That paper included an analysis of serum cholesterol and triglycerides and identified a new genetic signal for triglyceride levels in humans ” a gene called GCKR. On its own, however, this study lacked power to distinguish other new potential signals from statistical noise. By combining DGI data with that of two other studies, and by extensive replication in additional samples, the current study identifies a total of 18 strong signals, six of which are new. This brings the total for the DGI and its follow-up to seven newly identified variations associated with cholesterol and triglycerides. The DGI was led by David Altshuler, director of the Broad Institute's Program in Medical and Population Genetics, and associate professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Genome-wide association studies are the realization of a long-term effort to understand how human genetic variation impacts health. Built on the Human Genome Project, these studies have been made possible in the last year, driven by the recent completion of the HapMap Project and availability of large-scale research tools. Already, scientists from Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, as well as other research organizations worldwide, have used the approach to identify genetic differences that influence a variety of disorders, including type 2 diabetes, Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, obesity, age-related macular degeneration, and prostate cancer.
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