A sort of shadow of doubt has always surrounded the consumption of antibiotics during pregnancy, but this is the first time that it is proven that it could harm the fetus in a way that would make it have the tendency for child obesity.
Child obesity is one of the major health concerns in the world right now, as it has become more and more common for children everywhere to grow up with health problems due to being overweight, even encountering issues such as diabetes type-2 caused by their weight condition and lack of proper nutrition.
According to Science Daily, a new investigation from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health has studied what antibiotics during pregnancy can cause to the fetus - and their results show that there was a tendency for those children to grow up to be obese at age 7.
The study, called "Prenatal exposure to antibiotics, cesarean section and risk of childhood obesity" and published in the International Journal of Obesity, looks into the effects of antibiotics during pregnancy, in a study that went on for years after the fetuses were born. There were 727 mothers originally enrolled in the study, of which 436 - along with their children - were later followed until their kids were 7 years old, according to The New York Times.
The investigation was based on healthy and non-smoking mothers from prenatal clinics in two hospitals: the New York-Presbyterian and the Harlem Hospital Center, between 1998 and 2006. From the 436 children surveyed until age 7, a total of 16 percent of their mothers used antibiotics during their pregnancies, in their second or third trimesters of gestation.
The results were staggering: 86 percent of the children of mothers who had used antibiotics during pregnancy suffered from child obesity when they were 7 years old.
However, the study didn't only look into the effects that the consumption of antibiotics during pregnancy might have on the unborn child, according to Fox News. Another discovery was the fat that there's also a connection between children who were born with C-sections and the possibility of also developing child obesity later on.
