Eosinophils in asthma

There is an update of our eosinophil SNP paper now in the Lancet with 27 new asthma CpG associations. The authors claim 3 overlaps to Cookson’s  36 IgE loci while I see only cpg0177040, maybe there are two more conicidental findings in the supplement? At least the paper says

eosinophil counts were not significantly different between patients with asthma and controls in our discovery cohorts, suggesting that our results reflect the presence of a different subset or activation state of eosinophils, rather than a change in eosinophil counts per se. Although eosinophils are linked to sub-phenotypes of asthma such as the T helper 2-type subset, our study provides unequivocal data supporting their involvement at the epigenetic level in mild-to-moderate asthma in children.

maybe, maybe not – this could be just residual confounding…

Additionally, CpG methylation patterns identified an early-life shift from naive T cell populations towards effector and memory CD8 and natural killer cell subsets, indicating a potentially crucial role for host virus interactions

maybe, maybe not – this could be vaccine effects, some other antigens, allergens or vitamin D