To reduce your child’s asthma risk, get a dog and not cats

GROWING up with a pet dog reduces the chance a child will get asthma – but a cat raises the risk, a study has found.

Research led by Silvia Colicino, a PHD student at Imperial College London, found that some young children were less likely to develop asthma later in life if they have a dog.

“Young children prone to wheezing were less likely to develop asthma in later life if they have a dog in the home in early childhood,” she said.

“We need to further understand the reasons for this; previous studies have shown that dogs may carry ‘helpful’ protective bacteria, but they also carry allergens which may cause asthma symptoms. It is a mixed picture that we need to analyse further.”

She added that she believed that because dogs were dirtier, they exposed children to bacteria early on, which helped their immune system to protect them against allergies.

Dogs “tend to live outside and they carry high levels of bacteria. Early contact of children with dogs – up to two or three years old but especially in the first year of life – seems to protect against asthma,” she told the Daily Mail.

The study examined 20,000 children of five different age groups, including some who were suffering from wheezing when very young. The researchers aimed to identify risk factors which could suggest that a young child who was wheezing would later be likely to develop asthma, in order to build a predictive tool.

Many children grow out of wheezing they suffered from at a preschool age while others go on to develop asthma, which can be life-threatening.

Other signs that a child could develop asthma include an allergy to house dust-mites and cats, having a diagnosis of hay fever by the age of five, suffering from eczema and having a history of parental allergies.

Ms Colicino said: “A child with wheezing symptoms and eczema in early childhood is over 75 per cent more likely to develop asthma up to the age of 20 years compared to a wheezy child without eczema at preschool age.”

The findings were presented earlier this month at the British Thoracic Society’s winter meeting. Academics from Imperial College London, Brunel University, University of Aberdeen, University of Manchester, University of Southampton and University of Bristol collaborated on the report.