Asthma risk from cleaning products

Home › blog › 2022 › March › 22nd › asthma risk from cleaning products

22nd of March 2022 Article by Lotte Printz

ECJ’s Lotte Printz on a study from Norway suggesting children whose mothers work with cleaning products have a high risk of having asthma.

The risk of children developing asthma, or other respiratory conditions such as wheeze, increases by as much as 71 per cent if their mothers have been exposed to large amounts of cleaning products and disinfectants in their jobs. Even years before conception.

That’s the gloomy conclusion of a study done by Norwegian researchers Cecilie Svanes and Gro Tjalvin at the University of Bergen, published in the journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology late last year.

This is the first human study addressing offspring respiratory health effects as a result of mothers’ exposure to cleaning products and disinfectants prior to or around the time of conception or during pregnancy.

Two studies

Based on two international studies, Respiratory Health in Northern Europe (RHINE) and Respiratory Health in Northern Europe, Spain and Australia (RHINESSA), the two Norwegian researchers examined data from 3,318 adult participants from the latter and their mothers who had been exposed to indoor cleaning agents for six months or longer. The mothers had all worked as either cleaners, healthcare workers, cooks, hairdressers, or the like.

“It is well established that workers who are directly exposed to cleaning products and disinfectants are at a risk for respiratory symptoms and asthma. In addition, it has been suggested that exposures related to cleaning activities may constitute a risk to long-term respiratory health,” the paper says.

But why these products affect respiratory health is still not fully understood.

Rise in cases

Research that examines offspring’s respiratory health have also been scarce. Despite the fact that cases of childhood asthma have increased substantially since the 1980s.

The reasons for this increase remain largely unknown, but with this study Cecilie Svanes and Gro Tjalvin are suggesting that it may be down to chemical exposures affecting future parents’ somatic and germ cells, thus having an impact on the children’s health through germline cell exposure.

While the results of the study are of course worrying, this research also indicates that there seems to be no increased risk of developing asthma, had the mother started working in the said occupations and been exposed to those indoor cleaning agents after the child was born.

Whatever the reasons and their findings, the two women researchers stress that: “Considering the potential implications for a vast number of women in the childbearing age using cleaning agents, and their children, further research is imperative.”

For more on this: https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(21)01399-3/fulltext