Immune stimulation through exposure to commensal microbes may protect against allergy development. Oral microbes may be transferred from parents to infants via pacifiers. Researchers investigated whether pacifier cleaning practices affected the risk of allergy
development.
Researchers recruited pregnant women at one Swedish hospital and followed them and their children through phone calls and exams over three years.
The 184 infants in the study were particularly allergy-prone: 80 percent had at least one parent with allergies.
Infants were examined for clinical allergy and sensitization to airborne and food allergens at 18 and 36 months of age and, in addition, promptly on occurrence of symptoms.
Pacifier use and pacifier cleaning practices were recorded during interviews with the parents when the children were 6 months old. The oral microbiota of the infants was characterized by analysis of saliva samples collected at 4 months of
age.
At the first visit, 46 of them had eczema and 10 had asthma symptoms. Kids whose pacifiers had been sucked on by parents were 63 percent less likely to have eczema at 18 months and 88 percent less likely to have asthma, compared to the children of parents who didn't use that cleaning
technique.
By 36 months, the difference had gone away for asthma. Parental pacifier sucking was still tied to a 49-percent lower chance of a child having eczema, researchers led by Dr. Bill Hesselmar from Queen Silvia Children's Hospital in Gothenburg
found.
Researchers said the study can't prove the pacifier cleaning method protected kids against asthma and eczema, and that it's too early to recommend this technique to parents. It's possible parents who decided on their own to suck on their child's pacifier were different from parents who didn't in other important, allergy-related
ways.
Vaginal delivery and parental pacifier sucking yielded independent and additive protective effects against eczema development. Being delivered through a vaginal birth exposes babies to more of their moms' bacteria and has been linked to fewer allergies in childhood. But no one has ever looked at transfer of bacteria through pacifiers, Karmaus said. The salivary microbiota differed between children whose parents cleaned their pacifier by sucking it and children whose parents did not use this
practice.
For more information
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/
(MDN)
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