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| |  Specific IgE a Novel Clue to Identifying Children at Risk of Allergy: Presented at AAAAI By Maggie Schwarz PHILADELPHIA -- March 17, 2008 -- Allergy in children correlates with allergy in their mother, according to a study reported here at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology (AAAAI). "There are no good predictors of allergic risk in children," said Stephen Canfield, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary Allergy and Critical Care, Columbia University, New York, New York. "If we had good predictors of allergy risk, we could target preventive interventions. We could find children at highest risk and try to place them into low-allergen situations. So we looked to explore relationships between adults and children." Dr. Canfield and colleagues recruited 500 children living in New York City neighborhoods that are associated with high rates of asthma. Then, in a subset of 161 children for whom serum samples were available for both the parent and the child, the researchers measured each patient's total IgE level in serum and IgE levels for specific allergens (dust mite, cockroach, mouse, and cat). Results show that total IgE in children correlated with both parents' IgE levels. At a mean age of 4 years, boys had significantly higher total IgE levels than girls. Boys' total IgE correlated well with both their mother's and father's total IgE (P = .001 for both), while this was not the case for girls' IgE levels. In contrast, both boys' and girls' specific IgE levels were associated with their mother's specific IgE. Dust mite sensitisation in mothers was predictive of their children's sensitisation to each of the four studied allergens. In children older than 4 years, serum IgE positivity correlated with parents' IgE positivity more often than in children younger than 4 years. "The question raised by the research is why is the mother and not the father important in predicting a child's allergy?" Dr. Canfield noted. The next question to be addressed by the investigators is whether IgE positivity in parents can be used to predict asthma in older children, at 7 or 8 years of age. "We're following this cohort of families," Dr. Canfield said, "and it would also be a good idea to follow other groups of children as well."
[Presentation title: Allergy and Allergic Risk May Be Predicted By Measuring Parents' IgE Levels. Abstract 358]
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