FRIDAY, April 10, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- Very high prenatal per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) exposure is associated with an increased incidence of childhood asthma, according to a study published online April 9 in PLOS Medicine.
Annelise J. Blomberg, Sc.D., from Lund University in Sweden, and colleagues estimated associations between prenatal PFAS exposure and childhood incidence of asthma and wheeze in Blekinge County, Sweden, where a subset of residents was exposed to PFAS from drinking water contaminated by aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF). A register-based open cohort of 11,488 children born in Blekinge County between 2006 and 2013 was constructed; they were followed from birth until age 12 or Dec. 31, 2022.
During follow-up, 18 percent of children were diagnosed with wheeze and 17 percent were diagnosed with asthma. The researchers found an association for very high prenatal PFAS exposure with asthma incidence (hazard ratio, 1.44), while no associations were seen for high or intermediate exposure or for wheeze. The estimated cumulative incidence of asthma was 16.1 percent in the background-exposed group and 26.7 percent in the very highly exposed group in the Rubin causal model analysis.
"Our findings indicate that children with very high prenatal PFAS exposure from AFFF-contaminated drinking water experienced greater asthma incidence than those with background exposure," the authors write. "These findings likely have limited generalizability to populations with only background-level exposures or different PFAS mixtures, as exposure-response relationships remain uncertain and individual compounds vary in toxicity."