Asthma and lower airway diseaseThe protective effect of farm milk consumption on childhood asthma and atopy: The GABRIELA study
Section snippets
Study population and study design
The GABRIEL Advanced studies were conducted in 5 rural areas of southern Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Poland. Because of differences in study design, the Polish data will be reported separately. In phase I a short recruitment questionnaire was distributed through elementary schools to parents of all 6- to 12-year-old school children in the selected study areas. Three strata were defined as follows: (1) farm children (ie, children living on a farm run by the family); (2) exposed nonfarm
Results
The distribution of milk consumption stratified by farm and nonfarm children is shown in Table II (the prevalence of health outcomes is shown in Table E1 in this article's Online Repository at www.jacionline.org). Among nonfarm children, 71.2% reported exclusive shop milk consumption, whereas 45.0% of the farm children indicated exclusive farm milk consumption. Consumption of both farm and shop milk (mixed milk exposure) was more or less comparable between farm and nonfarm children,
Discussion
The results of this large epidemiologic study add to the increasing body of evidence identifying consumption of farm milk (early in life) to be associated with a reduced risk of childhood asthma and allergies independently of concomitant farm exposures.7, 8, 9, 10 The results indicate that the effect is due to the consumption of unheated farm milk. For the first time, associations between objectively measured milk constituents and asthma and atopy could be demonstrated. Neither total viable
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Supported by a European Union Research grant under the FP6-LifeSCIHEALTH Integrated Program LSH-2004-1.2.5-1 (contract no. 018996).
Disclosure of potential conflict of interest: J. Weber, B. Sozanska, H. Danielewicz, A Boznanski, A. Dębińska, M. Depner, A. Kosmęda, and C. Strunz-Lehner have received research support from the European Commission. D. Heederik and I. M. Wouters have received research support from the European Union. E. von Mutius is a consultant for Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, ALK-Abelló, and Protectimmun; has received a speaker's fee from InfectoPharm; has received research support from Airsonett AB; is a member of the Expert Panel for UK Research Excellence Framework; and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. M. Ege has received research support from the European Commission and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). M. Kabesch has financial interests in Roxall, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, Allergopharma, and AstraZeneca GmbH and has received research support from DFG, BMBF, and the European Union. The rest of the authors have declared that they have no conflict of interest.
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The members of the GABRIELA study group are shown in Appendix 1.