Researchers at the National Institutes of Health believe that prenatal caffeine exposure, even in tiny doses, may cause children to be shorter.
Children of pregnant women who consumed little caffeine were a little bit shorter than children born to pregnant mothers who drank no caffeine.
Between the ages of 4 and 8 years, the height differences grew larger.
The Division of Population Health Research at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the NIH, under the direction of Jessica Gleason, Ph.D., and Katherine Grantz, M.D., analyzed data from two previous long-running observational studies of pregnant people that also kept track of their children’s health through age 8
In blood samples taken from more than 2,400 pregnant women from the investigations, the researchers measured the levels of caffeine and its breakdown product paraxanthine.
They investigated for associations between maternal caffeine use and the body mass index (BMI) and risk of obesity in children as well as child height, weight, and BMI.
Their analyses took into account a number of additional variables, such as maternal height, pre-pregnancy weight, and smoking status, which may have an impact on a child’s growth.
While the researchers found associations between higher maternal caffeine consumption and shorter height in both study populations, they were unable to clearly identify patterns of variations in weight, BMI, or obesity risk depending on maternal caffeine consumption.
In the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) study of 788 children, those born to moms who drank the most coffee were on average 1.5 centimeters (cm) shorter than those whose mothers drank the least.
According to the research, coffee consumption in modest doses throughout pregnancy is associated with lower child height that lasts at least until age 8.
Other studies have discovered a connection between excessive caffeine use (more than one to two cups of coffee per day) during pregnancy and poor child health outcomes, including low birth weight.
“Future research on caffeine consumption during pregnancy should follow child growth over time to determine whether these height gaps continue into adulthood and if they are linked to a greater risk for cardiometabolic diseases,” said Dr. Gleason.
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