ScienceDaily (Dec. 28, 2009) — A pregnant woman's exposure to microbes may protect her child from developing allergies later in life. Researchers in Marburg, Germany find that exposure to environmental bacteria triggers a mild inflammatory response in pregnant mice that renders their offspring resistant to allergies.
The study will be published online on December 7, 2009 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. In an accompanying Commentary, Patrick Holt and Deborah Strickland discuss the biological mechanisms behind these findings and how they might one day prevent allergies in people.
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 theory, exposure of young children to environmental 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. 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.
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Of course, the effects of prenatal and postnatal exposure are not necessarily exclusive. They might both be helpful.
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