A new study, however, has found that young children who are exposed to a pet dog during the first year of their life are less likely to go on to develop asthma.
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The researchers used medical records of more than a million children and compared them with dog ownership registries (required by dog owners in Sweden).
However, the team still needs to conduct further studies to fully understand the safety and effectiveness of dogs in reducing the risk of asthma, the BBC quoted Erika Kennington of Asthma UK. Though the study has not proved any cause and effect relation, it does have bent towards the “hygiene hypothesis”, which means that early exposure to microbes may help in developing strong immune system of child.
The findings were published online November 2 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
Other factors that might connect animal ownership to lower asthma risk include the potential for kids who live with dogs or on farms to spend more time outside and get less indoor allergen exposure and live outside polluted urban areas, Virant, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by e-mail. The researchers wanted to determine if this relationship was also true also for kids who had dogs in their homes while they were growing up.
Tove Fall, lead researcher at the university, said: ‘Our results confirmed the farming effect and we also saw that children who grew up with dogs had about 15 per cent less asthma than children without dogs’.
But another expert said the findings on pets and asthma are getting clearer.
The researchers in Sweden investigated whether having a parent who was registered as a pet owner or animal farmer had an association with later diagnosis of asthma or medication prescribed for childhood asthma. “The takeaway is that early exposure may reduce the incidence of a later pathological process”, he said. Dogs can also help prevent asthma in kids.
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According to the charity Allergy United Kingdom, half of all asthmatic children are allergic to dogs, while 40 per cent are allergic to cats. Roughly 19,000 preschoolers had experienced at least one episode of asthma at the start of the study and more than 28,000 additional cases of asthma were recorded during follow-up.
