What's Growing Up Like for Asthmatic Kids with Pet Dogs?

There's now some good news for dog lovers who have young children at home or wanted to start a family. A recent study proposes that growing up with a pet pooch can possibly lower the risk of asthma.

As per CBS News, the World Health Organization reportedly stated that the most prevailing chronic illness among children is asthma, affecting 235 million all over the world.In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that 1 in 11 children and 1 in every 12 adults has the case, which makes it crucial for air to move in and out of the lungs, which leads to wheezing , coughing and shortness of breath.

Earlier studies before have discovered that people with a prior exposure to farm animals have a loweredthreat of asthma, but expertsneeded a better understanding of whether similar relationships might be true to people with pet dogs.

In a current research -- which is the biggest on the subject to date -Experts evaluated the national registry information on more than one million Swedish children to analyze the connection between prior contact with canines or farm animals and the consequent development of asthma.

The findings haveproved the result of farm animals and also revealed that children who grew up with dogs during the first year of their lives had a 13 percent decreased hazards of asthma by age 6. The results were recorded in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

Tove Fall, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Department of Medical Sciences and the Science for Life Laboratory at Uppsala University in Sweden, told CBS News that it is significant because asthma is a prevalent chronic illness and parents may be anxious whether or not they should keep their pets when having a baby.Fall has also integrated the research with experts from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

The study has variousrestraints however, including that it was limited to the Swedish population and that the experts followed children only up to age 7, so the subsequentoutcomeswere unknown. They also did not have access to the respective results for allergy testing so they could not conclude how many of the asthmatic children had dog-related allergic asthma.

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