United States: A study in Sweden, led by pediatricians and disease specialists from the University of Gothenburg and Skaraborg Hospital, discovered that babies born to parents who live on farms and are exposed to animals have fewer allergies as they grow older. The research suggests that living around animals may help strengthen the immune system and reduce the risk of allergies in children as they age.
The group considers that repeated exposure to farm animals during infancy, would cause variations in the gut microbiome, probably producing later effects that would prevent allergies.
In the last few decades, medical detectives uncovered that the gut biome is a whole lot more important in the human body than they had once imagined. In this new effort, the researchers in Sweden discovered that it may also be directly linked to the development of allergies.
As reported by the Medicalxpress, previous studies have as well demonstrated that immediately after birth, the human gut microbiome comprises high levels of facultative bacteria, these are bacteria that thrive in environments with high oxygen levels.
Due to the reduction in the amount of oxygen which the bacteria use up the gut becomes dominated by more anaerobic bacteria. The facultative bacteria are gradually replaced by the anaerobes, and the composition of the given biome becomes more diverse; in other words, the gut biome forms.
In this new attempt, the research team questioned whether it is important to live on a farm desire the critical stages of gut biome formation. To this end, fecal samples were taken from 65 children at two time points: at the infant stage and then when they are gradually growing up.
They further contrast samples obtained from kids who grew up in households that had animals other than pets, normal children who had no exposure to farm life, and children who were raised in farm like environment but had no direct contact with animals. Samples were taken at three days, 18 months, three years, and eight years.
The authors determined that rural children harbored seven-fold more anaerobes compared to facultative bacteria, which was true regardless of whether or not the children had direct contact with animals or pets. They also discovered that the dissimilarities in the gut biome between the two groups reduced with the growth of the children; however, non-allergic children were significantly younger; only those born on a farm developed allergies.