Asthma Academy: Developing educational technology to improve Asthma medication adherence and intervention efficiency.

Asthma is a leading chronic disorder among children and adolescents. Although some children outgrow asthma while transitioning into adulthood, there are others who continue to suffer from life-threatening asthmatic exacerbations. Teenagers tend to have certain misconceptions about their asthmatic condition and treatment which are rarely recognized or addressed in regular clinical consultations.

Relationship between treatment with antacid medication and the prevalence of food allergy in children.

Food allergy affects 8% of preschool children, but factors responsible for food allergy in children are poorly understood. Use of antacid medication may be a contributing factor. The purpose of this study was to determine if parent-reported antacid medication use was associated with higher prevalence of food allergy in atopic children.

Poor asthma control in obese children may be overestimated because of enhanced perception of dyspnea.

Background: Although studies in adults have shown a non-TH2 obese asthma phenotype, whether a similar phenotype exists in children is unclear.

Objective: We hypothesized that asthmatic children with obesity, defined as a body mass index above the 95th percentile for age and sex, would have poorer asthma control as well as decreased quality of life, increased health care utilization, and decreased pulmonary function measures as a function of increased TH1 versus TH2 polarization.

Methods: This study involved a post hoc analysis of cross sectional data from 269 children 6 to 17 years of age enrolled in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Severe Asthma Research Program.

Residential proximity to a major roadway is associated with features of asthma control in children.

Background: While several studies suggest that traffic-related air pollutants are detrimental for respiratory health, few studies have examined relationships between residential proximity to a major roadway and asthma control in children. Furthermore, a major limitation of existing research is reliance on self-reported outcomes. We therefore determined the spatial relationship between the distance from a major roadway and clinical, physiologic and inflammatory features of asthma in a highly characterized sample of asthmatic children 6-17 years of age across a wide range of severities.

Epinephrine autoinjector availability among children with food allergy.

Epinephrine is the treatment of choice for anaphylaxis. Delay in administration of epinephrine is a known risk factor for food allergy reaction-related mortality; however, individuals with food allergy may not have epinephrine readily available. This study was designed to determine the percent of food-allergic children that have an epinephrine autoinjector readily available and factors associated with epinephrine autoinjector carriage rates.

Mapping of numerous disease-associated expression polymorphisms in primary peripheral blood CD4+ lymphocytes.

Genome-wide association studies of human gene expression promise to identify functional regulatory genetic variation that contributes to phenotypic diversity. However, it is unclear how useful this approach will be for the identification of disease-susceptibility variants. We generated gene expression profiles for 22 184 mRNA transcripts using RNA derived from peripheral blood CD4+ lymphocytes, and genome-wide genotype data for 516 512 autosomal markers in 200 subjects.