Highlights
- •No large effect on future MS risk of most studied maternal and perinatal factors.
- •Possible exceptions, speculatively, are maternal smoking and pre-term birth.
- •This adds reassurance to parents of individuals with MS.
Abstract
Background
Pre-natal and early life factors may have a role in multiple sclerosis (MS) pathogenesis
in some people. However, the reporting of any influence of maternal and perinatal
factors on MS risk has been limited. We aimed to study maternal and perinatal characteristics
of babies who went on to develop MS.
Methods
Data were analysed from the historical Oxford Record Linkage Study dataset 1970–1989,
which incorporated a specialised maternity dataset with record linkage between mother
and baby, covering a population of 850,000. Each maternal admission record, and records
of her baby, were linked to any prior or subsequent recorded day-case or inpatient
hospital admission episodes 1963–2011. The file of the offspring was searched for
a subsequent record of MS, and the maternal and perinatal characteristics of the offspring
with a record of MS were compared with those with no record of MS.
Results
There was a record of MS for 75 of the offspring, of whom 60 were female. MS was significantly
more common in children of mothers who smoked (OR=2.1 (95%CI 1.0–4.7). There was a
tendency towards an elevated risk of MS in children of mothers of lower social classes
(social class 4+5 OR=1.9 (0.9–3.9)). There were no significant associations between
MS in the offspring and mothers’ marital status, maternal weight, parity, pre-eclampsia,
blood group, or babies’ birth weight, birth weight for gestational age, mode of delivery,
or presentation at delivery.
Conclusions
This study does not support an important role for most studied maternal and perinatal
factors in influencing MS risk. The possible exceptions, speculatively because numbers
of subjects with MS were small, were maternal smoking, and pre-term birth. Future
work, using datasets that would yield bigger numbers of cases of MS, should explore
interactions between perinatal factors that are unlikely to be acting independently.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: February 04, 2017
Accepted:
February 3,
2017
Received in revised form:
January 14,
2017
Received:
August 11,
2016
Identification
Copyright
© 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.
