Washington, Dec 28 (Inditop.com) A pregnant woman’s exposure to bugs may protect her child from developing allergies later in life, says a new study.
Researchers find that exposure to environmental bacteria triggers a mild inflammatory response in pregnant mice that renders their offspring resistant to allergies.
A new study conducted by Harald Renz and colleagues at the Phillips-University of Marburg in Germany, found that pregnant mice exposed to inhaled barnyard microbes gave birth to allergy-resistant offspring.
The progressive rise in allergies in the past several decades is often attributed to an increasing tendency to keep kids too clean — a theory known as the hygiene hypothesis.
According to this belief, exposure of young children to microbes conditions the developing immune system to tolerate microbes and allergens later in life.
Studies have shown, for example, that children raised on farms, which teem with microbes, developed fewer allergies than those raised in cities or non-farming rural regions, says a Phillips-University of Marburg release.
But it may not be the kids’ exposure that counts; children of farming mothers are also less susceptible to allergies regardless of their own exposure. But the biological mechanisms behind this phenomenon were a mystery.
The study was published online in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
