|
 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.
While the findings don’t prove that puppies prevent asthma, they do
suggest that expectant parents may not need to give away the family
pet for fear their baby might develop asthma from being around the
dog, said lead study author Tove Fall of Uppsala University in
Sweden.
“To let children have a pet in their home is likely to enrich the
family life in many ways, and perhaps also enriches the child’s
microbiome and immune system,” Fall said by email.
Fall and colleagues reviewed data on more than one million children
born in Sweden from 2001 through 2010.
The analysis included about 276,000 school-age kids, including
nearly 22,000 with a parent who owned a dog during the child’s first
year of life and about 950 with a parent who worked with farm
animals. Overall, about 11,600 had an asthmatic event during their
seventh year of life.
Exposure to dogs and farm animals during the first year of life cut
the risk of asthma for preschoolers, too, the authors found.
Preschoolers had a 10 percent lower risk of asthma if they’d been
exposed to dogs, and a 21 percent lower risk with exposure to farm
animals.
The study involved almost 379,000 preschool-age kids, including
about 53,000 exposed to dogs and 1,700 exposed to farm animals.
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.
Exposure to animals did not seem to have a protective effect in
children under age three.
Shortcomings of the study include a lack of data on allergies in the
family and a potential undercount of the number of households with
dogs, the authors acknowledge in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
Researchers also lacked data on exposure to dogs or farm animals
outside the home, and on cases when exposure to animals may have
stopped after the start of the study.
[to top of second column] |
The study also wasn’t designed to pinpoint why the animals might be
linked to a reduced asthma risk, Fall said.
“It might be due to a single factor or more likely, a combination of
several factors related to dog ownership lifestyle or dog owner’s
attitudes, such as kids’ exposure to household dirt and pet dust,
time spent outdoors or being physically active,” Fall said.
“As a parent in a dog and baby household, it is nearly impossible to
keep everything clean, and maybe this is a good thing for your
baby’s future health,” Fall added.
Children who spend a lot of time around dogs or farm animals might
be exposed to bacteria that are linked to a lower risk of asthma,
noted Dr. Frank Virant, an allergy researcher at the University of
Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital.
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 email.
Unless mom or dad are allergic, “the more animals the better,”
Virant said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1Hn9mcz JAMA Pediatrics, online November 2,
2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
