Asthma: Predisposing

Gina:: I have one more question, and this is about the cause. We’ve talked about environmental factors in asthma, but what causes it? Is a child born with a predisposition to have it, and something triggers it?
Dr. Redding:: Again, this is an area of great research right now. It’s clear that children are predisposed to asthma based upon their family history. There is therefore a genetic component that predicts the likelihood of having asthma. Now, having said that, it’s very clear that even if both parents had asthma, it’s not 100 percent chance your child will have asthma. It’s not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. It’s simply a matter of predisposition. We know that during the first year of life there may be events that minimize the risk of asthma. The current thinking is that viral infections may minimize the risk of asthma, that diarrheal disease may reduce the risk of asthma in the first year of life. It’s clear that children who live on farms have less asthma. It’s clear that children who are not firstborn but third- or fourth-born have less asthma. There is a great deal of interest in why that should be the case, and the current thinking is that exposures in the first one or two years of life may have some impact on who develops asthma and who doesn’t. This is not an area that’s well-defined as yet, so I think we’ll have to stay tuned to determine what the next research shows, but it’s an area of active investigation at this time.

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