Gene clue to asthma
An international team of researchers have discovered a gene which increases asthma risk by up to 70 percent. Published in Nature, a study showed that the activity of a gene called ORMDL3 was greater in the blood of children with asthma.
'We are confident that we have discovered something new and exciting about childhood asthma,' said co-author Dr Miriam Moffatt, from The National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London. 'These novel findings do not explain completely how asthma is caused, but they do provide a further part of the gene-environment jigsaw that makes up the disease’.
Pinpointing the gene was a two-stage process: In the first stage the researchers compared the genetic makeup of 994 children with asthma to that of 1243 non-asthmatics to identify which 'single letter spelling mistakes', known as SNPs, occurred more frequently in the asthmatic group. This led to the discovery of the link with the ORMDL3 gene.
In the second stage, the researchers looked at where (in which tissues) in the body the gene was being switched on, leading to the discovery that it was more active in the blood of the asthmatic group. To confirm their findings, they analysed the genetic makeup of over 2,000 German and over 3,000 British children born in 1958 and monitored them over almost 50 years to see if they developed the disease.
Dr Moffatt is optimistic about the potential for preventative therapies. 'We and our colleagues are currently preparing even bigger studies to find other genes of smaller effect, and to relate these to environmental factors that protect against asthma’, she said. 'Our eventual aim is to be able to prevent disease in susceptible individuals’.
Sources:
Gene linked to childhood asthma
Genetic variants regulating ORMDL3 expression contribute to the risk of childhood asthma