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By David Douglas NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Stress during pregnancy brought on by events like divorce, job loss or death of a loved one appears to be linked to an increased risk of asthma and eczema among children. These findings, Dr. Petra Arck told Reuters Health in an email, could "allow clinicians to evaluate future asthma risk in unborn children using a simple life event assessment questionnaire." Arck, of University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, and her colleagues note that although there are strong genetic components to asthma and related conditions, these alone do not help explain the unprecedented increase in such diseases in recent years. But there hasn't been much evidence to connect stress in pregnancy to asthma and eczema.