Maternal diet in pregnancy and the risk of inflammatory bowel disease in the offspring: a prospective cohort study.

BACKGROUND

Diet has been hypothesized as a risk factor for development of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

OBJECTIVE

To explore associations between maternal diet diversity and quality in pregnancy and the offspring's risk of IBD.

METHODS

We used data from a nationwide cohort study on 85,129 Norwegian children followed from birth (1999-2009) with information on maternal diet in pregnancy from validated food frequency questionnaires. Hazard ratios (aHRs) for IBD, Crohn's disease (CD), and ulcerative colitis (UC) by maternal diet diversity, quality and intake amounts of individual food groups were adjusted for maternal body mass index, parental IBD, and socio-demographic factors. Sensitivity analyses adjusted for the child's early-life diet quality and antibiotic treatment. Dietary exposures were classified into tertiles, comparing low (reference) to medium, and high levels.

RESULTS

During a mean follow-up time of 16.1 years (1,367,837 person-years of follow-up), 268 children developed IBD (CD, n=119; UC, n=76; IBD-unclassified, n=73). High compared with low diet diversity in pregnancy was associated with a lower risk of UC in the offspring (aHR 0.46, 95% confidence interval 0.25-0.87), with consistent findings after further adjustment for the child's early-life diet quality and antibiotic treatment. High compared with low diet diversity in pregnancy yielded aHRs of 0.81 for CD (0.51-1.28) and 0.75 for any IBD (0.55-1.02) in the offspring. A high compared with low diet quality in pregnancy or intakes of specific food groups were not associated with the offspring's risk of IBD or its subtypes.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings suggest that a higher maternal diet diversity in pregnancy may be associated with a lower risk of UC in the offspring.

Informations de copyright

Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of Competing Interest ☒ The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:Annie Guo reports financial support was provided by Henning and Johan Throne-Holst’s Foundation. Annie Guo reports was provided by The Swedish Society for Medical Research. Karl reports financial support was provided by The Swedish Society for Medical Research. Karl reports financial support was provided by The Swedish Research Council. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.