Gene associated with food allergy found

Eosinophilic esophagitis is a painful type of food allergy where, due to severe symptoms, sufferers often have difficulty eating one or more foods. In a major step towards better understanding the disease, a genome-wide association study has lead to a team of researchers identifying changes in genes within a region on chromosome 5 that were highly associated with eosinophilic esophagitis.

One of the genes in this region encodes a protein called thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP). When the investigators measured the expression levels of this gene in children with eosinophilic esophagitis, they found it was more highly expressed than in children without the disorder. This result suggests that TSLP plays some role in eosinophilic esophagitis. TSLP has been described through previous studies as a master switch that may turn on other allergic diseases, such as asthma and eczema.

The researchers collaborating on this study performed genome analyses on 181 samples from children with eosinophilic esophagitis at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and compared the findings to those from nearly 2,000 healthy controls from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. They then replicated the initial findings with additional DNA samples from eosinophilic esophagitis patients at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Further research in this area may lead to a genetic test for TSLP, with potential to find drugs that block the production or function of TSLP which might be useful in treating eosinophilic esophagitis.

Reference: Rothenberg et al. 2010. Nature Genetics. DOI: 10.1038/ng.547