The way in which the human rhinovirus wheezing illness interacts with your child’s genes may predispose him or her to asthma. This is according to researchers at the University of Chicago, whose study has shed light on how these wellness factor interact to create the respiratory condition. Carole Ober, PhD, Blum-Riese Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, along with Minal Caliskan, PhD, reported, “For the first time, we may have a genetic marker to identify which children who develop a wheezing illness when they have a cold in the first three years of life will be diagnosed with asthma later in childhood.”
With their colleagues, Ober and Caliskan looked at followed two cohorts of children from birth to seven or eight years of age, all of whom were from families at high risk for asthma. The first group, known as the COAST cohort, contains 200 children, all of whom had at least one parent with asthma, respiratory allergies or both. The 297 Danish children in the second cohort, called COPSAC, were born to mothers whose wellbeing is affected by asthma. The researchers evaluated the children for asthma from aged six to eight years in both groups
In the COAST group, the researchers began by investigating the links between genes and asthma, finding significant associations. They discovered that just under 30% of the children who did not have the asthma-related genetic marker were still diagnosed with the disease, whereas 40% of children with one at-risk copy developed asthma and 50% with two did also. There were also far more cases of human rhinovirus-related wheezing illnesses in the children who had two copies of the asthma-related genetic variation.
There was a striking difference when the researchers combined both factors, as roughly 25% of children who had no wheezing illness from human rhinovirus developed asthma. Of the children who had wheezed in the first the years of life, but lacked the risk-related genes, 40% developed asthma, which increased to nearly 60% for those with one copy of the asthma-related allele and to 90% for those with two copies. The researchers tried to replicate this finding in the Danish cohort, and found that this link between the at-risk genotype, wheezing illness in early life and asthma diagnosis persisted, even though the overall asthma prevalence was lower.
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