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Air pollution can cause a wide range of adverse health effects, including COPD, asthma, low birth weight, cancer, cardiovascular disease and an increased risk of premature death. A new study from the University of Copenhagen, Danish Pediatric Asthma Center and Herlev and Gentofte Hospital shows that even small differences in exposure to air pollution during pregnancy and the first years of life are associated with poorer lung function in children and adolescents.

"We found that children who were exposed to higher concentrations of air pollution during their mothers' pregnancy and their first years of life had an increased risk of lower lung function when we measured it at age 6," says Marie Pedersen, associate professor at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen and the lead author of the study published in BMJ Open Respiratory Research.

"And the children do not appear to outgrow this difference. Higher concentrations of air pollution were also associated with slightly impaired development of lung function throughout childhood and into adolescence."

The study is based on detailed data from several hundred pregnant women and their children, collected from pregnancy until the children reached 18 years of age through the Danish Pediatric Asthma Center. Researchers combined detailed calculations of air quality at participants' home addresses with repeated measurements of the children's lung function throughout childhood and adolescence.

5 ) and the gas nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), pollutants that originate from combustion processes such as traffic, industry, wood-burning stoves and agriculture.

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