Publications by authors named "P Le Souef"
Does lung function in preschoolers help to predict asthma in later life?
Pediatr Allergy Immunol
December 2024
Article Synopsis
- Early respiratory assessments during the neonatal period can indicate future lung function and asthma risk, reflecting both prenatal lung development and limited environmental influences.
- Factors like maternal smoking during pregnancy are linked to decreased lung function and higher asthma rates, especially in girls with specific genetic traits.
- Despite the association between preschool lung function and later asthma development enhancing our understanding of asthma physiology, practical challenges have hindered routine lung function testing in young children for asthma prediction.
The twenty-first century has seen a fundamental shift in disease epidemiology with anthropogenic environmental change emerging as the likely dominant factor affecting the distribution and severity of current and future human disease. This is especially true of allergic diseases and asthma with their intimate relationship with the natural environment. Climate change-related variables including increased ambient temperature, heat waves, extreme weather events, air pollution, and rainfall distribution, all can affect asthma in children, but each of these variables also affects asthma via alterations in pollen production and release, outdoor allergen exposure or the microbiome.
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- A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to assess vitamin D levels and deficiency rates among children with asthma in Asia and Africa, responding to inconsistent findings from previous studies.
- The review included data from 33 studies involving 3,432 children, revealing an average serum vitamin D level of 21.9 ng/ml, with over half of the children (53.7%) categorized as vitamin D deficient.
- Results indicated geographic disparities: children in Asia had lower average vitamin D levels (18.5 ng/ml) compared to their African counterparts (28.7 ng/ml), highlighting potential regional health disparities.
Real-world data on the range and impact of comorbid health conditions that affect pediatric asthma are scant, especially from developing countries. Lack of data hinders effective diagnosis, treatment, and overall management of these complex cases. We, hereby, describe the common pediatric asthma comorbid conditions in terms of evidence for association, potential mechanisms of impact on asthma control, and treatment benefit.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Recurrent wheezing disorders including asthma are complex and heterogeneous diseases that affect up to 30% of all children, contributing to a major burden on children, their families, and global healthcare systems. It is now recognized that a dysfunctional airway epithelium plays a central role in the pathogenesis of recurrent wheeze, although the underlying mechanisms are still not fully understood. This prospective birth cohort aims to bridge this knowledge gap by investigating the influence of intrinsic epithelial dysfunction on the risk for developing respiratory disorders and the modulation of this risk by maternal morbidities, exposures, and respiratory exposures in the first year of life.
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