Haile Gebrselassie has broken the world record on the Marathon distance in Berlin with 2:04:26! Gratulations!! Earlier this year in London he could not finish due to breathing problems. I wonder if there has been any systematic research on the relationship of air pollution and Marathon results? Munich marathon will start on Oct, 14!
No, I am not confusing here vitamin A and vitamin D as done in the early days of vitamin research. This post is really about vitamin A (but with similar nomenclature problem as with vitamin D). Retinol is ingested in a precursor form; animal sources like liver (–>cod liver oil) contain retinyl esters, whereas plants like carrots contain carotenoids. Continue reading Vitamin A and allergy
First use of liver cod oil probably originates with the fishing communities of Norway, Greenland and Iceland several centuries ago – an excellent reference is at “Cod liver oil and chemistry” 1895 by Peckel Möller. This book has a nice account on fishing at the Lofotes around the turn of the last century with many details about the cod fish migration.
The first medical use is being dated to 1789 Continue reading A short history of steamed cod liver oil
Nature had some good recommendations —
… there are challenges to making data on individual research participants available to other investigators, every effort should be made to provide researchers with an opportunity to reproduce the reported results and to investigate new hypotheses and methods.
accompanied by a bullet list
* Statement on availability of results and data so that, as far as possible, others can analyse them independently
The new expression paper published 3 days ago, however, ignores that largely Continue reading Castrated data
A new review paper about online genetic databases nicely summarizes the current state of the art (including my own efforts). There are only 13 databases Continue reading Genetic databases – the tragedy continues
I had the chance to install now the new PLINK GWAS software for a further analysis of recently published ORMDL3 asthma data. It seems that PLINK is some software that I was looking for a long time (paper link|download link). There are great and foolproof functions to check the validity of your data. I discovered for example unnoticed stratification in the German case-control sample by first and second component of the MDS analysis Continue reading Blink Plink
A new paper in Transplantation takes up an old question – can you passively transfer asthma or allergy? It seems so – the current study reports in 5 of 42 patients elevated IgE plus allergy symptoms. This is in line with earlier reports. Sorry to say — you can get allergy also by bone marrow transplantation.
Addendum 10/6/08
Blood
A total of 16 nonallergic recipients with allergic donors were reported to develop allergic disease posttransplant, however, conclusive information was available for only 5 cases. Allergic disease was reported to abate in 3 allergic recipients with nonallergic donors, however, conclusive information was available for only 2 cases. Problems in interpreting the reports include incomplete data on allergic disease in the donor or recipient pretransplant, not knowing the denominator, and the lack of controls. In summary, review of the literature generates the hypothesis that allergic disease is transferable
Addendum 14/7/22
Ann All Asthma Immunol
— the title of a letter in the most recent Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. So there is no need to comment further studies in the same issue. Continue reading Design flaws plus delivery flaws equal faux conclusions
Allergy research continues to be one of the most active research fields. New studies show that that fullerenes may inhibit the allergic response
Human MC and peripheral blood basophils exhibited a significant inhibition of IgE dependent mediator release when preincubated with C60 fullerenes.
Continue reading Allergy – everything from fullerenes to cannabis
To evaluate software that is depends on an expired system date, you may want to use this batch that wraps around calling a program.
rundate.cmd.
|wj_rundate.cmd|
I have written earlier about the hygiene hypothesis and my doubts that more or less “hygiene” influences the development of allergy (blog | paper). As we are further swamped with regular statements like Continue reading Believe me, it ‘s not hygiene
I am starting here a thread of immigrant studies – seems that there are now ~100 available in the medical literature. This could be the nice question for a meta-analysis: Does the move to a high prevalence country lead to more allergy, e.g. do your peers matter? Continue reading Allergy immigrant studies
-moblog- In my view, epidemiology is not very flexible to adjust to new methods and new techniques. Following some discussion that I had today with STW about eQTLs (quantitative traits derived by RNA microarrays or metabolome profiles) and JMA about system biology, it is likely that we are facing huge changes. Phenotypes may no more called intermediary and we may soon forget old controversies of disease definition. We will instead use new system-terms like NonImm076Trig31Ste0098 or TLR9-096321-Auto5337. Yea, yea.
I will present this poster next Monday in San Francisco at the Annual Conference of the American Thoracic Society. Continue reading Lactase variants in Europe – any connection to allergy?