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How your pet dog may protect your children from allergies
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Dogs may indeed be man’s best friends in ways not envisaged when the old saying was coined. It has been recognised for some time that raising of children from birth in the presence of animals, including farm livestock and domestic pets, appears to have a protective effect against development of allergies. New research from groups in the University of California, the University of Michigan, Henry Ford Health System in Detroit and Georgia Regents University in Augusta has cast light on the mechanism behind this protective effect. Prevalence of allergic asthma and other allergic diseases has reached almost epidemic proportions in westernised countries and imposes a significant human and economic cost.

The new research, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has shown that mice exposed to dust taken from a household with a dog exhibited a much reduced inflammatory response to subsequent exposure to either ovalbumin or cockroach allergen compared to mice exposed to dust from a pet-free household or to no dust. This included a reduction in many of the elements typically associated with allergic responses, including airway T cells, Th2-related airway responses, IgE levels and mucin secretion. The study used PCR to confirm previous observations that a higher amount of dust was collected from the household with the dog and it contained a range of bacterial species, whereas the dust from the no pet household gave no 16S rRNA product and had a low bacterial burden. Intriguingly, the study confirmed that the composition of the gut microbial community, known as the microbiome, was very different in the protected animals compared to the other groups, with significant enrichment of bacterial species including Lactobacillus johnsonii. The group examined L. johnsonii further, and found that wild type mice to which this bacterial species was orally administered were protected from inflammatory responses to both airway allergen challenge and to infection with respiratory syncytial virus. However, the level of protection afforded by L. johnsonii was not equal to that of the whole dust sample from the dog-containing household, indicating that other species contribute to the protective effect.

These results suggest that in the future, manipulation of the gut microbiome to include ‘helpful’ species such as L. johnsonii may help protect us against both allergy and pulmonary diseases. Dr Susan Lynch of the University of California and the lead author on the study has confirmed that studies are on-going on human samples in a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)-funded large multi-institutional collaborative study.

Sources
FUJIMURA, K.E., DEMOOR, T., RAUCH, M., FARUQI, A.A., JANG, S., C. JOHNSON, C., BOUSHEY, H.A., ZORATTI, E., OWNBY, D., LUKACS, N.W. and LYNCH, S.V., 2013. House dust exposure mediates gut microbiome Lactobacillus enrichment and airway immune defense against allergens and virus infection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1310750111

FUJIMURA, K.E., JOHNSON, C.C., OWNBY, D.R., COX, M.J., BRODIE, E.L., HAVSTAD, S.L., ZORATTI, E.M., WOODCROFT, K.J., BOBBITT, K.R., WEGIENKA, G., BOUSHEY, H.A. and LYNCH, S.V., 2010. Man's best friend? The effect of pet ownership on house dust microbial communities. The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 126(2), pp. 410-412.e3

University of California - San Francisco. "How household dogs protect against asthma and infection." ScienceDaily, 16 Dec. 2013. [Accessed 17 Dec. 2013].
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How your pet dog may protect your children from allergies00