According to Science Daily Sweden has been studying the connection with dogs and children with asthma. They have some results and research that suggests that children that have dogs are less likely to have asthma. This is amazing to me because one of the triggers of children with asthma is a dog. I have heard that certain type of dogs can “take” the asthma from your child or help reduce the signs and symptoms of asthma or an attack. This article has great information and very interesting!
A total of more than one million children were included in the researchers' study linking together nine different national data sources, including two dog ownership registers not previously used for medical research.
“Earlier studies have shown that growing up on a farm reduces a child's risk of asthma to about half. We wanted to see if this relationship also was true also for children growing up with dogs in their homes. Our results confirmed the farming effect, and we also saw that children who grew up with dogs had about 15 percent less asthma than children without dogs. Because we had access to such a large and detailed data set, we could account for confounding factors such as asthma in parents, area of residence and socioeconomic status” says Tove Fall, Assistant Professor in Epidemiology at the Department of Medical Sciences and the Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, who coordinated the study together with researchers from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.
In Sweden, every person carries a unique personal number. Every visit to a specialist physician and every prescription made are recorded in national data bases, accessible for researchers after de-identification of data. Even dog ownership registration is mandatory in Sweden since 2001. These scientists studied whether having a parent registered as a dog-owner or animal farmer was associated with later diagnosis or medication for childhood asthma.