Medpage Today Parents who suck on their child's pacifier to clean it may be
inadvertently reducing that child's risk of developing allergies,
researchers found.
At age 18 months, children born to parents who
said they cleaned their child's pacifier with their mouths were less
likely than those born to parents who cleaned the pacifier in other ways
to have asthma (odds ratio 0.12, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.99) and eczema (OR
0.37, 95% CI 0.15 to 0.91), according to Bill Hesselmar, MD, PhD, of
Queen Silvia Children's Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues.
At
age 36 months, the association remained for eczema (HR 0.51, 95% CI
0.26 to 0.98), but not for asthma, the researchers reported online in Pediatrics.
The
findings suggest that the transfer of oral microbes from the parent to
the infant could be responsible for modifying the allergy risk, and
indeed, the make-up of the bacteria in the infants' saliva distinguished
between those with parents who did and did not suck on their child's
pacifier. [...]
I have my own theory. Parents that suck their kids pacifiers to clean them are obvious less hygienic in general and have probably developed a superior resistance to all the allergens they constantly slurp up. This may pass on to their kids.
ReplyDeleteDoes this practice calm the parents?
ReplyDeletewhat if the parent has many allergies?
ReplyDeleteThis fits in with the hygeine hypothesis that we're so concerned about providing sterility to our kids that their bodies have no idea how to handle the environment. When kids ate dirt for fun they did get sick less.
ReplyDelete"I have my own theory. Parents that suck their kids pacifiers to clean them are obvious less hygienic in general and have probably developed a superior resistance to all the allergens they constantly slurp up. This may pass on to their kids."
ReplyDeleteThis "theory" makes as much sense as autism is caused by vaccines. You can't just make up theories that are proven false! Also, your theory makes no sense. Maybe you should learn how allergies work. It is the bodies own immune system that attacks something that is harmless.
The reason the article thinks the sucking on the pacifier does anything is because, as the theory goes, the more you expose your kids, the less chance the immune system will recognize something that is harmless as harmful.