Share a Pacifier with Your Toddler, Helps Kids Become Allergy Free

It might seem rather unorthodox, but sucking on your child's pacifier may be all they need to prevent them from developing allergies. We're shocked too, but a new Swedish study suggests this simple approach introduces children to a wide world of microbes that can help prevent these health issues.

Although that may sound disgusting or even risky to some, researchers found that the transfer of oral bacteria from adults to infants seems to help train the immune system to ignore germs that don't pose a threat.

"The immune system's purpose is to differentiate between harmless and harmful," said Dr. Ron Ferdman, a pediatric allergist at Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

"If your immune system is not presented with enough microbes, it just defaults to doing harmful attacks against things that are not harmful, like food, cat dander or dust mites."

A report released last week from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics showed that the number of American children with allergies has dramatically increased in recent years, with about 13 percent having skin allergies and 17 percent having respiratory allergies.

The study actually shows that children whose parents sucked on their pacifiers to clean them were less likely to have asthma, eczema and sensitivity to allergens than children whose parents didn't.  

The authors concluded that parental sucking of their baby's pacifiers may help decrease the risk of allergy caused by transfer of microbes through the parent's saliva.

206 pregnant women in Sweden were initially recruited as participants, and 187 of their infants were included in the research. The scientists sought families with at least one allergic parent to see if they could identify a different immune response in the children.

The researchers studied the transfer of microbes in the parents' saliva by fingerprinting bacterial DNA in 33 infants' saliva, of which 21 had parents who sucked on their pacifiers.

A total of 187 babies were followed until the child was 18 months old, and 174 were followed until they were 36 months old. The researchers chose to evaluate the children at those specific points in time because some diseases, such as eczema, develop early in life, said Dr. Bill Hesselmar, an associate professor at Queen Silvia Children's Hospital, in Gothenberg, Sweden.

Introducing solid foods into an infant's diet did not seem to affect the study results, Hesselmar said. "We found differences in the oral microbial flora already at 4 months of age, at an age when most children are still on breast milk."

However, not all researchers are certain about how accurate the study is. 

Ferdman, who was not associated with the research, urged caution in interpreting the results of the study. "It's a small number of babies studied, so it's hard to generalize," he said.

He also expressed concern that results may not be widely applicable because the data were taken solely from Swedish participants, who are not a genetically diverse population.

The findings for the study can be found in the journal Pediatrics.