Toddlers who share a bed with their parents may have an increased risk of developing asthma later in childhood, a new study suggests.

Dutch researchers monitored the health of over 6,100 mothers and their children every year until the children were six years of age. Information on wheezing and asthma symptoms was gathered, as was the sleeping patterns of the children when they were two months old and two years old.

For the purpose of the study, bed sharing was defined as a child sharing a bed with its mother or both parents.

The study found that babies who had shared a bed with parents at the age of two months did not have an increased risk of wheezing during their first six years of life. They also did not have an increased risk of being diagnosed with asthma during this time.

However, if the child was sharing a bed with parents at the age of two, they had an increased risk of experiencing wheezing between the ages of three and six. They also had an increased risk of being diagnosed with asthma at the age of six.

According to Dr Maartje Luijk of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, these findings show that ‘there is an association between toddlers who share a bed with their parents at the age of two years and wheezing and asthma in later childhood'.

"We postulated that the finding may be explained by parents taking the decision to share a bed with their toddler to monitor their asthma symptoms. However our results found no associations between pre-existing asthma symptoms in the first two years of life and bed-sharing at the age of two years.

"This could suggest that bed-sharing increases the risk of asthma in some way," he commented.
However, he acknowledged that the study ‘does not provide causal evidence of this' and there could be a number of reasons for the findings.

"For example, bed-sharing families might be more likely to report wheezing because they are more attentive or aware of their children's breathing. Alternatively, families might perceive wheezing as problematic and as something that could lead to sleep problems, which might in turn elicit bed-sharing to better monitor these problems," he said.

The researchers called for more research to help identify the factors that may increase the risk of developing asthma though sharing a bed.

Details of these findings are published in the European Respiratory Journal.

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