Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Susceptibility to Asthma:


Asthma is a chronic respiratory condition that inflames and narrows the airways making it difficult to breath; some individuals can be more susceptible than others. A large factor in increased suspibility is bronchial hyperresponsiveness, which is a heightened bronchoconstrictor response to a variety of stimuli. Bronchial hyper responsiveness is related to serum IgE levels and airway inflammation. The experiment done compared 303 children and grandchildren of 84 probands with asthma selected from a homogeneous population in the Netherlands and each participant's Ventilatory function, bronchial responsiveness to histamine, and serum total IgE were measured. The results showed that 
"a trait for an elevated level of serum total IgE is coinherited with a trait for bronchial hyperesponsiveness and that a gene governing bronchial hyperresponsiveness is located near a major locus that regulates serum IgE levels on chromosome 5q. These findings are consistent with the existence of one or more genes on chromosome 5q31-q33 causing susceptibility to asthma."
This study shows a correlation with asthma and serum IgE and that if an individual has high IgE levels, they have a high level of bronchial hyper responsiveness and in turn have asthma.

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