A child’s risk of developing asthma is the smaller the more the microbiota of the child’s home resembles that of a farm house.
A child’s risk of developing asthma is the smaller the more the microbiota of the child’s home resembles that of a farm house. This was shown by a study conducted by the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) that analysed indoor microbiota from 400 Finnish and 1,000 German homes.
Earlier research has shown that growing up on a farm with animals may as much as half the risk of asthma and allergies. The protective effect is thought to be attributable to the diverse microbial exposures encountered on farms.
”We now discovered that the presence of farm-like microbiota in an early-life home seemed to protect from asthma also in urban homes. The effect was not based on the presence of large number of different microbial species but, rather, differences in the relative abundance of certain bacterial groups,” says Pirkka Kirjavainen, Senior Researcher at THL.
Wearing outdoor shoes indoors, the number of siblings and the age of the house played a role
The study found that the microbiota in homes protecting from asthma contained a wealth of bacteria typical of the outdoor environment, including bacteria in soil. On the other hand, the proportion of microbes normally occurring in the human respiratory tract and associated with respiratory tract infections was small.
Read more at National Institute for Health and Welfare
Image: Asthma-protective microbiota in urban homes had high abundance of bacteria of the outdoor environment. (Credit: National Institute for Health and Welfare)
