WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Children of women infected with influenza during pregnancy have a substantially higher risk of heart disease late in life, according to a study published last week.

The findings underscore the danger facing pregnant women from the H1N1 swine flu virus, or any other strain of flu, and also demonstrate that what happens in the womb can affect a person decades later.

Caleb Finch of the University of Southern California and colleagues studied records from the 1918 flu pandemic and found that boys whose mothers were infected during the second or third trimester of pregnancy with them had a 23 percent greater chance of having heart disease after age 60 than boys whose mothers were not infected. Girls exposed in the second or third trimesters were not at greater risk for cardiovascular problems. But girls infected during the first trimester were 17 percent more likely than the general population to have heart disease later in life.