“One of the main hypotheses at the moment is that kids in animal environments breathe air that contains more bacteria and bacterial fragments, which actually could lower their risk of asthma”.
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“We wanted to see if this relationship also was true also for children growing up with dogs in their homes”.
“This is important because asthma is a common chronic disease and parents may worry whether or not they should keep their pets when having a baby”, Tove Fall, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Department of Medical Sciences and the Science for Life Laboratory at Uppsala University in Sweden, told CBS News.
Swedish researchers have looked at data on more than one million Swedish children and found that those who grew up with dogs had a 15 percent lower risk of asthma. “Since we could access a large and detailed data set, we could account for confounding factors such as asthma in parents, area of residence and socioeconomic status”. The cause of the protection from asthma from farm life and from dogs is basically the same. New evidence suggests that Fido may play a role in childhood asthma risk.
Despite finding the correlation between exposure and asthma risk in young children, the researchers could not determine why this was the case.
“But if you have an allergic child you should not get a dog to cure your child”.
The new findings are in line with the so-called hygiene hypothesis, said Dr. Purvi Parikh, an allergist and immunologist with Allergy & Asthma Network, a nonprofit organization that promotes allergy research and education, who was not involved in the new study.
Among the preschool-age children, those who were exposed to farm animals during their first year were 31 percent less likely to have asthma when they were between 1 and 5 years old, compared with the kids who were not exposed to farm animals during their first year of life, according to the study, published today (Nov. 2) in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. That, coupled with additional sources of information taken from other dog registries, allowed for more rigorous conclusions. “Thanks to the population-based design”, says senior author Dr. Catarina Almqvist Malmros from Karolinska, “our results are generalizable to the Swedish population, and probably also to other European populations with similar culture regarding pet ownership and farming”.
Dog exposure during infancy was associated with a 13 percent lower risk of asthma in school-age children, while farm animal exposure was linked to a 52 percent risk reduction.
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It appears, however, that more research will need to be done to validate their results stateside.
