Endotoxins and wheezing – a New Zealand birth cohort study
Thursday, 21 December 2006 20:54
Clinical research continues to seek the factors responsible for increasing prevalence of childhood allergy and atopic disease.
In an article just published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (Gillespie et al 2006;Vol 118 pp1265-70), domestic endotoxin was associated with reported airway and skin symptoms in a cohort study on 881 New Zealand children. Endotoxin is not a food allergen, but is a biologically active lipopolysaccharide that makes up part of the cell wall of Gram-negative bacteria. Previously, a number of longitudinal studies have shown a positive association between early wheezing and domestic endotoxin exposure.
Endotoxin levels in dust samples were collected in a 1-m2 site from the bedroom floors of 3-month-old infants and measured as a marker of infant exposure to endotoxin. The study’s main finding was that endotoxin exposure at 3 months of age was associated with reported wheezing and an itchy scaly rash at 15 months but was not associated with rhinitis or atopy. For wheezing, the effect was confined to infants with a parental history of allergy. This study supports findings from previous birth cohorts that indicate the susceptibility to endotoxin in infancy is at least partly inherited. A large number of
