A clever way to reduce your baby’s asthma & allergy risk

Being a pet owner has a lot of benefits for your health, and if you decide to start a family, research suggests owning a pet can reduce your child’s asthma and allergy risk. Not everyone is up for the responsibility, however, so how do you reduce a child’s asthma risk without having to take on another mouth to feed?

According to a new study to be presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) International Congress in Munich, Germany today, allowing a child to sleep on animal fur during the first 3 months of life may be enough to prevent asthma later on in childhood.

SEE ALSO: Is exposure the key to asthma and allergy prevention?

“Previous studies have suggested that microbes found in rural settings can protect from asthma,” said Dr. Christina Tischer of the Helmholtz Zentrum München Research Centre, reported by MNT. “An animal skin might also be a reservoir for various kinds of microbes, following similar mechanisms as has been observed in rural environments. Our findings have confirmed that it is crucial to study further the actual microbial environment within the animal fur to confirm these associations.”

To gather data, researchers followed more than 2,000 children from infancy to age 10, with slightly more than half of those children sleeping on animal fur during the first 3 months of life.

At the end of the study period, children who had slept on animal skin were 79 percent less likely to have developed asthma by the age of 6 than children who had not been exposed to animal skin, with the decreased risk remaining for 41 percent of participants by the final age of 10.

This might be a significant breakthrough that might avoid children from either being around or owning pets later in life because of airborne allergies these animals and even other allergens might present.all

This is not the first study to prove allowing children exposure to certain environmental microbes may be beneficial. Parents, especially first-time parents, often go into lock-down mode, desperately trying to prevent children from being exposed to possible illness. While it is beneficial to maintain good sanitation protocols and health rules, preventing children from experiencing natural immunity is considered more harmful than allowing them to occasionally become ill.

Exposure to microbes is not the only factor that influences childhood asthma. Studies suggest what a mother eats during pregnancy and her stress load can impact asthma risk. A child’s weight also plays a role, as previous studies have found “waist circumference inversely correlates with pulmonary function and directly correlates with asthma severity.”

SEE ALSO: Obesity: Contributing risk factor for childhood asthma in Hispanics

It may not be possible to prevent childhood asthma completely, but if allowing your infant to sleep on animal fur for the first three months of life might help, why not give it a try?