Moderate caffeine intake safe for pregnant women

CONSUMING too much caffeine can lead to insomnia, increased heartbeat, anxiety, and so on. Pregnant women are especially made to steer clear of caffeine for reasons that it could affect their unborn children. But a new study says that moderate amounts can be harmless even to pregnant women.  

According to research published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, pregnant women who drink and eat moderate amounts of caffeine will not harm their unborn babies.

The study conducted by The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is the first to focus on how in utero (in the womb) caffeine exposure affects a child’s future intelligence and behavior later in childhood, found caffeine did not lead to lower IQ or increased behavioral problems.

Coffee © Adela Manea_Dreamstime Stock Photos

“We did not find evidence of an adverse association of maternal pregnancy caffeine consumption with child cognition or behavior at 4 or 7 years of age,” said Mark A. Klebanoff, MD, principal investigator in the Center for Perinatal Research at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s and faculty member at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.

The conclusion was based on a marker of caffeine in the blood of 2,197 expectant mothers who took part in the Collaborative Perinatal Project, conducted across the United States in 1959-74. These were the decades when pregnant women consumed coffee freely since there was no basis to say it was unsafe to do so. Therefore, the study was able to investigate a broader range of caffeine intake than if a similar study was done today.

Researchers looked at the association between a chemical called paraxanthine, the primary metabolite in caffeine, at two points in pregnancy. They compared those levels to the child’s IQ and behavior at 4 and 7 years of age. They did not find consistent patterns between maternal caffeine ingestion and the development and behavior of those children at those points in their lives.

No relation to obesity

This study follows previous research regarding caffeine consumption during pregnancy conducted at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s. Dr Klebanoff and Sarah Keim, PhD, co-author and principal investigator in the Center for Biobehavioral Health at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s, published a study in Epidemiology in March 2015 involving the same group of women from The Collaborative Perinatal Project and found that increased ingestion of caffeine during pregnancy did not increase the risk of childhood obesity.

Of the children in the study, about 11% were considered obese at 4 years and about 7% at 7 years. However, the researchers found no associations between their mother’s caffeine intake and these occurrences of obesity.

“Taken as a whole, we consider our results to be reassuring for pregnant women who consume moderate amounts of caffeine or the equivalent to 1 or 2 cups of coffee per day,” said Dr. Keim, who is also a faculty member at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.