share a pacifier w/ mom + dad, reduce allergy risk?

[CMdeux]

Study: Suck Your Child's Pacifier to Cut Allergy Risk

Hesselmar and colleagues explored whether exposure coming from saliva transferred on a pacifier was related to allergy development among 184 full-term infants born to women enrolled in the AllergyFlora study. For the study, researchers mostly approached families with at least one allergic parent, a situation present for 80% of the participants.

When the children were 6-months-old, the parents were interviewed about pacifier use and cleaning practices and other information.

Overall, 74% of the infants used a pacifier in the first 6 months of life.

For those infants, 83% of parents reported using tap water to clean the pacifiers, 54% reported boiling, and 48% reported using their mouths (parents could select more than one option).

By 18 months, 25% of the children had eczema, 5% had asthma, 15% had sensitization to food antigens, and 2% had sensitization to inhaled antigens.

Pacifier use itself was not associated with the risk of any of those outcomes, but parental sucking on the pacifier was related to a lower likelihood eczema and asthma. Sensitization was not related to pacifier cleaning practices.

They acknowledged that the study was limited by the small sample size and by the difficulty of diagnosing asthma in early childhood, and called for replication in larger studies and in older children.

Well.... that's.... nice.  Too bad they didn't note any of the OTHER major limitations with the study.

There are SO many things wrong with this headline relative to the study it actually refers to.

Because apparently this is only true if one parent has allergies, you are Swedish, and under three.  Oh, and only eczema, really... because by the time you're three, any differences in asthma pretty much have gone away.  ZERO difference in sensitization rates, and hey... doesn't it pretty much take two complete seasonal cycles for the 95% CI to 'arrrive' w.r.t. aeroallergen symptoms?  Only the super-allergic (that would be BOTH parents with allergies, yes?) seem to get there sooner.

Pretty much thinking that they excluded THAT group with their recruitment protocol.  Oddly, they were inclusive of a few infants from non-atopic backgrounds, which is really bizarre if they wanted to study an epigenetic effector like this.

[twinturbo]

Or.... (drum roll, please)  kids that don't use pacifiers.

[YouKnowWho]

LOL The kid who sucked his pacifier near to death for two years is the one who has the most allergies in the house.  And yeah, I was the suck it off and give it to him kind of parent (except for the one he spit across the floor in the Newark airport bathroom - was not that brave LOL).  Heck - I am lucky that I didn't kill him pre-diagnosis.

Suck it off, oy vey my brain.

[SilverLining]

I wonder which of the participants had dogs.  Maybe more of the parents that suck off the pacifiers are the same ones that have dogs.

[Mfamom]

i'm pretty sure my kid had allergies the day he was born.  He had horrible eczema, didn't tolerate formula etc. 
Sucked the crap out of his "bop" too.  Til he was 5....he gave it to Goofy when we went to Disney and we were FINALLY done with it.