Neonatal airway immune profiles and asthma and allergy endpoints in childhood.

Background: The immune system plays a key role in the pathogenesis of asthma and allergy, but the role of the airway cytokine and chemokine composition in vivo in early life prior to symptom development has not been described previously. Here, we aimed to examine whether the neonatal airway immune composition associates with development of allergy and asthma in childhood.

Methods: We measured unstimulated levels of 20 immune mediators related to the Type 1, Type 2, Type 17, or regulatory immune pathways in the airway mucosal lining fluid of 620 one-month-old healthy neonates from the COPSAC birth cohort.

Distinct immune phenotypes in infants developing asthma during childhood.

Early exposure to environmental triggers may elicit trajectories to chronic inflammatory disease through deregulated immune responses. To address relations between early immune competence and development of childhood asthma, we performed functional immune profiling of 186 parameters in blood of 541 18-month-old infants and examined links between their response phenotype and development of transient or persistent disease at 6 years of age. An abnormal neutrophil-linked antiviral response was associated with increased risk of transient asthma.

[Affected liver biochemistry in children with rheumatic diseases].

Children with rheumatic diseases often have elevated liver biochemistry. This can be triggered by medical treatment, e.g.

Prenatal vitamin D supplementation reduces risk of asthma/recurrent wheeze in early childhood: A combined analysis of two randomized controlled trials.

Background: We recently published two independent randomized controlled trials of vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy, both indicating a >20% reduced risk of asthma/recurrent wheeze in the offspring by 3 years of age. However, neither reached statistical significance.

Objective: To perform a combined analysis of the two trials and investigate whether maternal 25-hydroxy-vitamin D (25(OH)D) level at trial entry modified the intervention effect.

Noninvasive Sampling of Mucosal Lining Fluid for the Quantification of In Vivo Upper Airway Immune-mediator Levels.

This protocol describes noninvasive sampling of undisturbed upper airway mucosal lining fluid. It also details the extraction procedure used prior to the analysis of immune mediators in fluid eluates for the study of the airway topical immune signature, without the need for stimulation procedures (often used by other techniques). The mucosal lining fluid is sampled on a strip of filter paper placed at the anterior part of the inferior turbinate and left for 2 min of absorption.