A report published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that asthma is a complex genetic disorder. Pediatric researchers have identified a gene that may provide an important target for new childhood asthma treatment. The genome-wide association study (GWAS) was conducted on 793 white North American children with persistent asthma, comparing them to a control group of 1,988 children. They replicated the study in a separate group of 2,400 European subjects and controls, then did further analyses on a third group of 3,700 African American children. The gene with an apparent role in asthma is DENND1B, already suspected as a player in the body’s immune response. DENND1B expresses a protein of the same name, which is active in immune cell subtypes that regulate the body’s response to foreign bodies such as viruses, bacteria and allergens. The researchers found the same gene for asthma susceptibility in children of European and African-American ancestries. For access to the complete study, please visit:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/362/1/36