Sucking on your baby's dummy before giving it to them may prevent asthma and eczema in childhood
- Transferring bacteria found in spit from parents to babies boosts immunity
- 18-month-old babies, whose dummies had been sucked by parents, were 63% less likely to develop eczema and 88% less likely to get asthma
Parents ‘cleaning’ baby dummies by sucking on them could help protect their children from asthma and eczema.
Researchers believe the transfer of microbes could increase the bacterial diversity of babies’ digestive systems and boost immunity.
'We know these bacteria are important for development,' said Dr Wilfried Karmaus from the University of Memphis, who has studied asthma and eczema, but who was not involved in the new research.
Toddlers are less likely to suffer with immune-related conditions such as asthma and eczema if their parents suck their dummies when they are babies
Being delivered through a vaginal birth,
for example, exposes babies to more of their mother’s bacteria and has
been linked to fewer allergies in childhood.
However, no one has ever looked at transfer of bacteria through dummies before, Dr Karmaus said.
For the new study, researchers recruited pregnant women at one Swedish hospital and followed them and their children for three years.
The 184 infants in the study were particularly allergy-prone because 80 per cent had at least one parent with allergies.
When the babies were six-months-old, 65 parents reported 'cleaning' their dummies by sucking on them.
The children were tested for allergies at 18-months-old and 46 of them had eczema and ten had asthma symptoms.
The transfer of bacteria in the mouth from parents to babies may help strengthen a child's digestive system which could in turn boost immunity
Those whose dummies had been sucked on by their parents were 63 per cent less likely to have eczema and 88 per cent less likely to have asthma, compared to the children of parents who did not use the cleaning technique.
By 36-months-old, however, the difference had disappeared for asthma.
Parental dummy sucking was still tied to a 49 per cent lower chance of a child having eczema, the researchers from Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital in Gothenburg found.
There was no clear link between parents’ dummy cleaning method and babies’ sensitisation to common allergens, such as cats, dogs, eggs or peanuts, at either age.
In a smaller analysis of 33 infants, the same researchers found that babies whose parents did suck on their dummies had different types of bacteria living in their mouths to those whose parents did not.
'This is a simple measure which is really, really nice,' Dr Karmaus said. 'But we need a trial to be really sure that this is protective.'
A gold-standard trial would involve
randomly assigning some parents to regularly clean dummies by sucking on
them and others to never use that method.
In the current study, Dr Karmaus said, it is possible parents who decided on their own to suck on their child’s dummy were different from parents who did not in other important, allergy-related ways.
'It could be that these parents have more time with their children, a less stressful relationship with their children, hug their children more or whatever,' he told Reuters Health.
For now, he said, parents should know that using their mouth to clean an infant’s dummy may be worth trying - and at the very least, should not be harmful.
That technique may also be a necessity from time to time, Dr Karmaus accepted.'Sometimes you take two or three pacifiers with you but if all are dirty and your child is crying, there’s nothing you can do but clean it yourself.'
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