Farms Shield Kids From Bowel Disease

Barnyard dirt may bolster young immune systems, research suggests.

By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, August 6, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

MONDAY, Aug. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Children regularly exposed to farm life as babies are about half as likely as other kids to develop inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease, German researchers report.

The findings, published in the August issue of Pediatrics, fall into line with what experts in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs), allergy and asthma call the "hygiene hypothesis."

That theory "refers to the observation that children living in environments with lower levels of microbial exposure seem to be at higher risk for the development of allergies," explained the study's lead researcher, Katja Radon, of Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.

Crohn's and ulcerative colitis are autoimmune illnesses, where the body's immune system mistakenly attacks its own tissues. It is possible that this dysfunction may originate, at least in part, in how immune responses develop very early in life, said Dr. Joel Rosh, director of pediatric gastroenterology at Goryeb Children's Hospital, part of the Atlantic Health System in Morristown, N.J.

He pointed out that while rates of IBDs are holding steady in the developing world, they are rising sharply in more affluent nations.

"It's something that we are doing to ourselves," Rosh said.

"The thinking is that if your immune system isn't appropriately challenged at the appropriate time in life, then it might do some wacky things," Rosh added. In other words, a too-clean environment -- while healthy in some ways -- might be less than ideal when it comes to immune-linked illness, experts say.

The German study is one of the first to compare inflammatory bowel disease rates against infant exposures to farm animals and farm life. The German team questioned the parents of more than 2,200 6- to-18-year-old children. More than 300 of the children had ulcerative colitis, another 444 had Crohn's, and almost 1,500 were free of either illness.

Kids with either Crohn's or ulcerative colitis "were less likely to have lived in rural environments and were less likely to have farm contact in the first year of life, before the disease had developed," Radon noted.