There used to be such a tale about pregnant women, but now the Swedes have done a lot of research and hint that children from omeprazole and similar drugs then more often get bronchial asthma.
This story began twenty years ago. Then the connection between heartburn and asthma was studied.
Everyone has heard that from getting acid into the esophagus there can be bronchospasm. Therefore, if a person with ordinary bronchitis has a cough for more than three weeks, then they immediately think about acid reflux from the stomach.
So somewhere around 2000 it became fashionable to look for feedback. That is, if a person already has bronchial asthma, then he can also have acid reflux from the stomach.
Even when the side effects of inhalers were excluded, it is still, for some unknown reason, the lower esophageal the sphincter, which keeps the acid in the stomach, for some reason relaxed, and the acid got into asthmatics esophagus.
They quickly got used to this funny phenomenon and did not really bother with delicate mechanisms.
About ten years later, it became fashionable to look for the cause of childhood asthma in omeprazole or similar drugs that were taken by pregnant women.
Sometimes this was clearly noticeable, and sometimes it was not particularly confirmed. They agreed that there might be a connection. Omeprazole, along with drugs like famotidine, which were taken by pregnant women, was called a possible risk factor for developing asthma in offspring.
That is, they officially ticked the box, but didn't bother too much. Because among small children, the prevalence of bronchial asthma is up to 30%. There one could find a connection between anything and anything.
The fact is that if the mother has asthma, then the child is inherited with a high probability also will have asthma. And whatever the mother is treated during pregnancy, the child may still have asthma. This is genetics.
Pregnancy itself predisposes to the development of heartburn, so everything is tied in a vicious circle.
And now the Swedes honestly said that they had heard about the connection of drugs that lower the level of acid in the stomach in pregnant women with asthma in children. They took data on the health of tens of thousands of children and tracked when and after which asthma began. It turned out that asthma was found one and a half times more often in those who were treated with drugs like omeprazole.
The suspicion immediately arose that not everything was clean here, and omeprazole could be the cause of asthma in children. But this is literally a suspicion, because the cause and effect has not been precisely established.
By and large, this is about the same as previously assumed, so no one is scolding omeprazole so far.
