According to a new study, kids who are exposed to dogs and other related domestic animals may have lower risk of developing asthma.
The research was conducted by examining more than 1 million Swedish children. The researchers found out that those children who are exposed to dogs were 15 percent less prone in developing the said chronic inflammatory disease compared to kids who don't have dogs at home. The study also suggests that children who were raised in the farm have lesser percentage to develop asthma.
Tove Fall stated that the result of the study is not yet that official and the whole research team is still looking for other factors.
"Our results confirmed the farming effect and we also saw that children who grew up with dogs had about 15 percent less asthma than children without dogs," said by the lead author who is also an assistant professor of epidemiology at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Because we had access to such a large and detailed data set, we could account for confounding factors such as asthma in parents, area of residence and socioeconomic status," the professor added.
Fall also stated that there are already former studies which show that kids who grew on farms have less risk of having asthma. As what he had said, the research team is just trying to find out if the same result will be obtained if the variable is when children raise dogs in their homes.
On the other hand, Catarina Almqvist Malmros, the senior author of the study and a professor of clinical epidemiology at Karolinska Institute in Sweden clarified that the result of the study is only applicable to kids who don't have allergies or asthma yet.
Although the study has consistent results, the authors still acknowledge that they have some shortcomings which include the lack of data on allergies for each family and the undercount of the number of dogs in each household.
