Category Archives: Allergy

Allergy

A dual role of IgE

While my most recent hypothesis paper on the origins of IgE is still under review, I discovered a new study in Immunity that says in a nut shell

A growing body of evidence indicates that IgE antibodies and mast cells might serve not only as the effectors of immediate hy-persensitivity in subjects with established sensitivity but also as amplifiers during initial antigen exposure in naive subjects, potentially providing early signals for nascent Th2 cell and anti-body responses.

This fits perfectly to what I am saying , that there seem are self-enforcing & uncontrolled loops of a largely abandoned immune function.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026
Allergy, Software

Journal of Allergy

Being spammed by a company called Hindawi for many years, I tried to find out a bit more about one of their journals called “Journal of Allergy”. The website http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ja says

Journal of Allergy is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles, review articles, and clinical studies in all areas of allergy. Journal of Allergy currently has an acceptance rate of 43%. The average time between submission and final decision is 59 days and the average time between acceptance and final publication is 34 days.

According to their own description, they are located in Cairo and employ some 200 to 1,000 employees. Hindawi seems to be the name of one of their founders. In some other web sources they claim  410 Park Avenue, 15th Floor, New York, USA, as their address.  Google Streetview shows at  that address a 11+2 floor building with Chase Manhattan Bank located at the ground floor.
Only 40 or so of the 500+ Hindawi journals have any impact factor associated with.
Declan Butler at Nature already wrote about these kind of journals:

Open-access publishers often collect fees from authors to pay for peer review, editing and website maintenance. Beall asserts that the goal of predatory open-access publishers is to exploit this model by charging the fee without providing all the expected publishing services. These publishers, Beall says, typically display “an intention to deceive authors and readers, and a lack of transparency in their operations and processes”.

At the moment, the Journal of Allergy is not being black listed by Beall (while Hindawi had been in the past). “Journal of Allergy” should not be confused with “The Journal of Allergy”[Jour] that has 1514 PUBMED entries while the “Journal of Allergy”[Jour] has only 157 entries so far. Is this an “intention to deceive authors and readers”?
The most recent issue appears as of “Epub 2014 Apr 6”, the first one as “Epub 2009 Jul 2”, so the company basically publishing 2-3 papers per month.
The Pubmed Analyzer are not very informative here. The whole “Journal of Allergy” has accumulated only 135 citations in the past 5 years (not an impressive figure as I have authored more than a dozen single papers that have received all more citations than the whole journal).
The extreme low citation rate and the missing impact factor may not be taken as an indicator that all papers are of poor quality but raises serious doubts.
The next question therefore is: Does the journal run a state of the art review process? The website list the following 24 scientists on the review board:

William E. Berger, University of California, Irvine, USA
Kurt Blaser, Universität Zürich, Switzerland
Eugene R. Bleecker, Wake Forest University, USA
Jan de Monchy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Frank JP Hoebers, MAASTRO Clinic, The Netherlands
Stephen T. Holgate, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
S. L. Johnston, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Young J. Juhn, Mayo Clinic, USA
Alan P. Knutsen, Saint Louis University, USA
Marek L. Kowalski, Medical University of Lodz, Poland
Ting Fan Leung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Clare M Lloyd, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Redwan Moqbel, University of Manitoba, Canada
Desiderio Passali, University of Siena, Italy
Stephen P. Peters, Wake Forest University, USA
David G. Proud, University of Calgary, Canada
Fabienne Rancé, CHU Rangueil, France
Anuradha Ray, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Harald Renz, Philipps University of Marburg, Germany
Nima Rezaei, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran
Robert P. Schleimer, Northwestern University, USA
Massimo Triggiani, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy
Hugo Van Bever, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Garry M. Walsh, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom

Unfortunately this list is not identical to the editor names that are being listed directly on the PDFs ( eg the academic editor RM is not being listed at the web front). The  above editor list includes indeed some well respected scientists but there are also others that show their Hindawi affiliation as their first hit on Google only. As I know 7 of the 24 persons, I decided to email them a short 6 item questionnaire via Surveymonkey.

When did you start your role as an editor?
2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
2. What is your role there?
Leading editor- supervising associate editors
Editor – assigning papers to reviewes, holding final decision Reviewer – reading and scoring papers
Sonstiges (bitte angeben)
3. How many papers have you been dealing with?
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or more
4. How many papers did you accept?
nearly none, about half, most, all
5. Are you being paid for that work?
no, yes, don’t want to tell
6. Is this a serious journal?
no, yes, don’t know

2 of my 24 emails bounced- some of the members of the editorial board are already retired.
19 did not respond. I believe they will show the same behaviour when being addressed by Hindawi.
1 editor sent me a personal email saying that he will resign from the board. It will be interesting to see when the list of editors will be changed, I already started a change detection.
3 editors answered the mini survey: Editor #1 started in 2010, has been dealing with more than 5 papers, accepted most, is not paid and believes it is a serious journal. Editor #2  started in 2009 with all other responses being identical.  Editor #3 started also in 2009 but accepts only half of the papers.
It doesn’t come unexpected that these 3 motivated editors believe in a regular review process. I fear, however, that most editors either do not work for the journal (anymore) or are not motivated to spend even 3 minutes for the quality control of their work.
Without any transparent review process like that at the BMC journals, we can not judge from the outside if there is any review process. The names of the individual reviewers are unknown, and even contacting the authors would not help as they don’t have an interest to reveal that they get a paper published without any review process.

As a library one could order printed copy ( e.g. 20 articles per year for $395 ) although I could not locate any library in the world that has any subscription to this journal.
As an author I would be charged $800 per PDF. There seems to be no major text editing included in the publication process, what you get for your $800 is a quickly reformatted text, a PUBMED entry and a PDF sitting at a cloud server for an unknown storage time. My estimate for that service is $10.

Declan Butler developed a check list of serious publishers and journals. So we can now use that check list to judge this journal.

Check that the publisher provides full, verifiable contact information, including address, on the journal site. Be cautious of those that provide only web contact forms.

FAILED (PARTIALLY)

Check that a journal’s editorial board lists recognized experts with full affiliations. Contact some of them and ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.

FAILED (PARTIALLY)

Check that the journal prominently displays its policy for author fees.

PASSED

Be wary of e-mail invitations to submit to journals or to become editorial board members.

FAILED (SPAMMER)

Read some of the journal’s published articles and assess their quality. Contact past authors to ask about their experience.

FAILED (POOR QUALITY)

Check that a journal’s peer-review process is clearly described and try to confirm that a claimed impact factor is correct.

FAILED (NO IMPACT)

Find out whether the journal is a member of an industry association that vets its members, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org).

PASSED

Another set of guidelines for fake journals is available at Wikipedia. Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include

Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.

CAN NOT BE DECIDED YET

Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.

FALSE

Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.

TRUE

Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.

UNCLEAR

Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.

FALSE

Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.

TRUE

Verdict: The journal does not pass the Butler criteria of a scientific journal.

Comment: I do not see any major problem if an open access journal is publishing all manuscripts it receives, leaving the final decision of being good or bad science to a post-publication review process. I see, however, a major problem if any pre-publication review process is being assumed for Pubmed listed papers (and paid for) while being never documented in a transparent way.

Addendum: Change log editor page

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026
Allergy

John Bostock – the first scientific description of allergy

The Lancet reported recently about the life of John Bostock, the famous author “Of the Catarrhus Aestivus or Summer Catarrh” in  the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions 1828; Vol.14: 437-446.

And I knew already that his grave is on the Kensal Green Cemetry in London. Although the description at findagrave is correct, I needed additional help of the cemetry – Ioannis Bostock (1773-1846) is buried in grave number 6263, square 102. It is a portland stone pedestal with an urn on it (he died of cholera) but the inscription is very faint after nearly 170 years and reads

Continue reading John Bostock – the first scientific description of allergy →

 

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Allergy, Noteworthy

Bullet points for future allergy research

Maybe this is a difficult task – defining an agenda for future research. Here are some thoughts as we don’t know the reasons for the allergy epidemic even after 100 years of research. And we don’t have any cure yet, there is some relief of symptoms and there are some limited curative efforts but we don’t have any real understanding of what is going on. The following research areas may therefore be identified in NON-therapeutic research: Continue reading Bullet points for future allergy research →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026
Allergy, Vitamins

The best vitamin D paper in 2013

I have probably two candidates here. The first one is by the Cantorna group in October 2013 and provides for the first time a link between between the gut microbiome and oral vitamin D exposure. We all thought that vitamin D has no influence on bacteria as they cannot utilize it. But that doesn’t seem to be true as the composition of the microbiome may change.

Mice that cannot produce 1,25(OH)2D3 [Cyp27b1 (Cyp) knockout (KO)], VDR KO as well as their wild-type littermates were used. Cyp KO and VDR KO mice had more bacteria from the Bacteroidetes and Proteobacteria phyla and fewer bacteria from the Firmicutes and Deferribacteres phyla in the feces compared with wild-type. In particular, there were more beneficial bacteria, including the Lactobacillaceae and Lachnospiraceae families, in feces from Cyp KO and VDR KO mice than in feces from wild-type … Our data demonstrate that vitamin D regulates the gut microbiome and that 1,25(OH)2D3 or VDR deficiency results in dysbiosis, leading to greater susceptibility to injury in the gut.

So while I always thought, oral vitamin D supplementation may have a direct effect on the gut mucosal system, this paper opens a completely new avenue. Continue reading The best vitamin D paper in 2013 →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026
Allergy, Genetics

New species alignment

The UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group ( who is running one of my favorite websites ) just announced

After 15.4 years of CPU run-time in 9,905,594 individual ‘jobs’ and 99 cluster runs for lastz pair-wise alignment…we are excited to announce the release of a 100 species alignment on the hg19/GRCh37 human Genome Browser.
This new Conservation track shows multiple alignments of 100 species and measurements of evolutionary conservation using two methods (phastCons and phyloP) from the PHAST package. This adds 40 more species to the existing 60 species track on the mm10 mouse browser. For more information about the 100 species Conservation track, please see its description page.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026
Allergy, Vitamins

The first proven risk factor for allergy

After more than a century of research, the first successful clinical trial of an allergy risk factor has been performed. It looks like the authors even did not anticipate such an effect (known as triple blind design). But read what the Pubmed article about the Norizoe et al. paper says

To elucidate whether maternal vitamin D supplementation during lactation improves infantile eczema and other subsequent allergic disorders, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was performed.
Mothers (n=164) of infants with facial eczema at one-month checkup were randomly assigned to receive vitamin D3 supplements (n=82; 800 IU/day) or placebo (n=82) for 6 weeks from May 2009 to January 2011. The primary outcome was infantile eczema quantified by Scoring Atopic Dermatitis (SCORAD) index at the three-month checkup, and the secondary outcomes were atopic dermatitis, food allergy, and wheeze diagnosed by doctors up to 2 years of age.
There was no significant difference in SCORAD at 3-month checkup between two comparative groups. Doctor-diagnosed food allergy was significantly more common up to age 2 years in vitamin D group (10/39: 25.7%) than in placebo group (3/40: 7.5%; RR=3.42, 95%CI=1.02 to 11.77, P=0.030). Moreover, at least one secondary outcome was also significantly more common in vitamin D group (17/39: 43.6%) than in placebo group (7/40: 17.5%; RR=2.49, 95%CI=1.16 to 5.34, P=0.012).
These results suggest that vitamin D supplementation may not decrease the severity of infantile eczema at three months of age, but may rather increase the risk of later food allergy up to two years of age. Because a large number of subjects was lost to follow-up, further study is needed to confirm the findings.

Of course, there may be some weakness in the study design, a large loss to follow-up and the way how food allergy was diagnosed will be critized. I think, however, that this is a major breakthrough that raises the hope that we will finally understand how allergy develops.

Addendum Dec 23th, 2013

I should have added “true” risk factor, as there are positive trials on probiotics and atopic dermatitis. The meta-analysis by Lee immediately lead to a rebuttal

Their review fails to meet published standards for the quality of systematic reviews on several criteria, and this has led to inappropriate conclusions. […] These defects in methodologic rigor have led to an exaggeration of the clinical benefits of probiotics for eczema prevention.

The Cochrane Summaries are also negativ

There is not enough evidence to recommend using probiotics for the treatment of eczema.

Same situation with asthma

We found no evidence to support a protective association between perinatal use of probiotics and doctor diagnosed asthma or childhood wheeze

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026
Allergy, Vitamins

The 5 most important papers on vitamin D and respiratory infections in asthma

Ginde AA et al., Vitamin D, respiratory infections, and asthma, Current Allergy and Asthma Reports 2009:

Substantial evidence now indicates that vitamin D may enhance the innate immune response and protect against respiratory infection. The human cathelicidin hCAP- 18 appears to have a particularly important role in the vitamin D–mediated mechanism against infection. Additionally, early evidence suggests that vitamin D modulates regulatory T-cell activity and IL-10 production, which are critical to the Th1–Th2 balance. These findings may be particularly important in the pathogenesis, control, and severity of asthma. However, Continue reading The 5 most important papers on vitamin D and respiratory infections in asthma →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026
Allergy, Genetics

Will the bacterial flora protect you from you allergies?

Here is another post as the field seems to progress so fast with a new study on enterotypes of the human gut microbiome from

22 newly sequenced faecal metagenomes of individuals from four countries with previously published data sets, here we identify three robust clusters (referred to as enterotypes hereafter) that are not nation or continent specific.

The 3 clusters are Bacteroides (enterotype 1), Prevotella (enterotype 2) and Ruminococcus (enterotype 3) – no idea if these are under selective pressure from the host (genes!), from enviroment (antibiotics!) or from microbial competitors. When we look, however, at another study published also last week at Science magazine, it seems that at least one cluster has it’s own trick to get the right of residence by synthesizing a symbiosis factor. Continue reading Will the bacterial flora protect you from you allergies? →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026
Allergy, Vitamins

Handout text 2011 AAAAI Seminar San Francisco Vitamin D deficiency

2011 AAAAI Annual Meeting Handout

Session Number: 3523
Session Title: Vitamin D: Vitamin D Deficiency Causes Asthma -> CON
Session Start: 3/20/2011 12:45 AM
Matthias Wjst, Munich

Welcome to the third major symposium on vitamin D and asthma at the AAAAI. Continue reading Handout text 2011 AAAAI Seminar San Francisco Vitamin D deficiency →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026
Allergy

Science crowd funded?

I already wrote an earlier essay about science as crowd source enterprise. Funding initiatives and funding selection of scientific projects, however, have never been transparent to me (even with all the EU announcements and lobbying before setting out the large framework programmes).
Reading now at david-campbell.orgabout a photo project in Afghanistan Continue reading Science crowd funded? →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.02.2026