This project aims to investigate a potential link between Caesarean section delivery and childhood development of an allergic disease (e.g. asthma, Crohn’s disease, allergic rhinitis (or hay fever), and eczema). This is based on the theory that a child’s susceptibility to develop an allergic disease is in part related to the micro-organisms that live in their gut. A potential source of a child’s beneficial intestinal bacteria is the maternal vaginal canal. When a baby is delivered via C-section, they are bypassing this source of intestinal flora, and it is thought that lack of exposure to this bacteria may increase the child’s likelihood of developing allergic disease. This theory is in line with the “Hygiene Hypothesis”: the theory that a lack of exposure to infections and micro-organsisms as a child negatively impacts on the development of the immune system and increases susceptibility to developing allergic disease.
This project will investigate whether caesarean section delivery is associated with childhood allergic diseaseusing data collected from a British cohort called the UK Millennium Cohort Study. This study follows a group of 19,000 children who were born in the UK at the beginning of the millennium. Data is collected from the children in different sweeps (i.e. at different ages), the first one at 9 months of age and the most recent in 2015, when the children were 14.
