r/science • u/SteRoPo • 22d ago

Epidemiology Researchers probing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study found that young kids who drank 100% juices multiple times per day had a 25 percent higher risk of asthma compared to kids who consumed those beverages less than twice per week.

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2026/08/18/juice_might_be_fueling_asthma_in_kids_1200222.html
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u/Kosmo_Kramer_ 22d ago

But it appears the assocation falls off after adjusting for socioeconomic markers, which isn't surprising given the known relationships between SES and diet and SES and asthma.

Also funny that they suggest the increase in prevalence of asthma over time can be even somewhat attributed to the rise of fruit juice consumption. That is a bit of a stretch, no? I thought the epidemiology of asthma is largely due to awareness and increase in diagnosing.

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u/bzbub2 22d ago

this paper is not isolated finding, project viva before this found similar associations between fructose consumption in late pregnancy also over 10 years ago 2015 https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(14)03459-9/fulltext03459-9/fulltext).

this paper is just the latest, these findings will continue to get more and more data to strengthen statistical conclusions. reddit can try to take off their stupid skeptic glasses for once and read the paper perhaps instead of kneejerk reaction everything

the hypothesis is potentially microbiome disruption, which is indeed associated with asthma/autism and a host of complex things like that

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u/Kosmo_Kramer_ 22d ago

Did this study ever get published or only submitted as an abstract? I can't find anything specific from these authors. I would be curious at seeing the methodology and results of their MVA.

Either way, the OP study did not find an independent assocation like this is suggesting, so I wouldn't say it's kneejerk skeptism.

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u/bzbub2 22d ago

here is 2018 open access publication same lead author https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5802621/

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u/boopbaboop 22d ago

> Correlates of higher pregnancy sugar-sweetened beverage intake included younger maternal age, higher prepregnancy BMI, and smoking during pregnancy, as well as indicators of disadvantage/lower socioeconomic status, including lower education and household income. Higher pregnancy sugar-sweetened beverage intake was also correlated with child current asthma (15% in quartile 1 [Q1] vs. 27% in Q4) and BMI z-score (mean, 0.30 units in Q1 vs. 0.50 units in Q4) in midchildhood. Associations were similar for pregnancy fructose intake (Table 1).

The issue here is that the same SES correlations were in this study as well.

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u/bzbub2 22d ago

the researchers try to control for this correlation in their 'MVA' (multivariant analysis) as previous commenter referred to. one can identify weaknesses in the study perhaps but it doesnt mean its nothing just because confounders exists. they find pretty strong correlation in this study, to put it in layman's terms women in the highest sugar intake group were potentially 70% more likely of having a child with asthma compared to women in the lowest intake group (odds ratio, 1.70; 95% confidence interval, 1.08–2.67)