Tag Archives: allergy

Allergy

Blaming genes for resistance to environmental stressors

This something that I always avoided in human research – blaming genes for resistance to environmental stressors.

Nevertheless a Californian group (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1008528) now tested 101 mouse strains for lung resistance with exposure to diesel exhaust particles (DEP). After sensitizing the animals with dust mite and aluminium they could also test metacholine hyperreactivity (AHR).

Strains that exhibited the highest lung resistance after control exposure were not necessarily the same as those with high lung resistance after DEP exposure. It is unclear which strain was used for the consecutive GWAS. Did they put all mice into one cage for that?

The metacholine AHR GWAS results are not very impressive. And there seem to be also errors, as for example the lead SNP on chr 19 (rs51547574, near IL33) is shown with different allele frequencies in text and Fig 2.  As the expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) for Il33 is not in the lung, I think there is nothing to memorize here – IL33 is just a gatekeeper for surface integrity.

In a next step I wouldhave expected a GWAS for resistance change after DEP but FIG 3 only gives the result of Δ AHRDEP—AHRPBS data at an abitrary methacholine dose of 10mg/ml. The identifed locus could be interesting but as the LD there is rather high without any corresponding eQTL (I always wondered why there has never been a significance threshold for LD blocks, only for isolated SNPs?), the logic of the paper is broken here. Induction of lung resistance by DEP was significantly blunted in Dapp1-/- female mice? What about male Gm5105-/- , Mttp-/- , and Lamtor3-/- animals?

Hopefully nobody else will now try to find diesel, ozone, NOx resistance genes in humans as this is not a a scientific but a political issue…

Allergy, Genetics

What is wrong with the 2011 NEJM paper?

N Engl J Med 2011;364:701-9 is another paper with 1000+ citations  that had a lasting impression on some but not all people.

First, I can’t remember of any study with such an enormous selection bias  where >94% of individuals have been lost.

Second, we should not forget that farm is not protective per se – farmers may just avoid a known allergy risk factor.  PARSIFAL participants in this study included Steiner schools — anthroposophic medicine mostly avoids vitamin D (ref). This is of course a major issue for any cross-sectional study that doesn’t take into account the temporality of events.

Third, in PARSIFAL dust from children’s mattresses were collected by vacuuming — it is not very likely that many helminthic eggs were transported  from stable to bedroom. In GABRIELA, only airborne dust samples  were collected which again may miss helminth eggs although being certainly present in stable dust.

Fourth, more  microbial exposure and more fungal taxa on farms are a trivial finding.

The inverse associations of the diversity scores with asthma were not confounded by status with respect to living on a farm because adjustment did not change the respective point estimates for asthma (Table 2), although the associations became nonsignificant.

Small sample size, borderline p-values even after a long fishing expedition?

What do these strange “probability” plots  really show – the probability of asthma or the probability to live on a farm?

N Engl J Med 2011;364:701-9 Figure 3 Does it refute any general effect of diversity?

The plots are misleading if adjustment for farm living does not change the parameter estimates for bacterial/fungal diversity.

Sixth – even many years later, the main findings of this study have not been independently replicated. There is not any single study that shows listeriosis (Listeria) or diphtheria (Corynebacterium)  to be protective.

Allergy, Philosophy

medRxiv

ArXiv is operational since 1991, bioRxiv since 2013 and since 2019 there is now also medrxiv. More details  at https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2301

The main arguments in favour of sharing work in its preliminary form are, firstly, that science works faster if work is made available sooner after it is completed and, secondly, that articles are improved by feedback from a wider group of readers, alongside formal peer review by a few experts. Simple estimates suggest that halving the delay to sharing a research result can double the speed at which research progresses. Ambitious research funders are now embracing preprints and other measures that aim to accelerate the pace of research.

Although there was a mixed reception in the beginning, see Science back in 2017

MedArXiv will have a hard time attracting preprints if mainstream medical journal editors decide they won’t publish final versions of the papers. Currently, The BMJ and The Lancet are among the few medical journals that have explicitly said that posting a preprint doesn’t preclude publication; Nature and Science, which both occasionally publish medical studies, have the same policy. But at the JAMA Network, which publishes a dozen journals, the issue is hotly debated.

@medRxiv opened on June 6. So far they have only 304 followers on Twitter (and no allergy paper in the archive).

As the current “Allergy” editor and the publisher (John Wiley and Sons A/S)  agreed to preprints last week, I have submited now my first preprint paper. Therefore, there are now 305 followers and 1 allergy paper :-)

Allergy, Genetics

IL33, allergy and helminths: Shot in the leg?

Ever since our NEJM paper in 2010 that showed an IL33/ST2 association there are new studies on IL33.

Grotenboer 2013 did a functional annotation of the gene and it’s receptor in humans while there is no more doubt about the involvement of IL33 in human allergy.  Right now IL33 suppression is already used as an experimental screening test for allergic reactivity with ongoing phase II studies of anti-IL33 or anti ST2. Good IL33 reviews can be found for example in frontiers in immunology by Tataori et al. or in nature immunology by Smith.

These reviews do not tell you so much about the regulation while regulation has recently elucidated by Gour et al. who describe a tropomyosin–dectin-1 interaction of the human host. Why is tropomyosin such a frequent target of human IgE?

Muscle protein tropomyosin is an important IgE target in a number of nematode infections; Onchocerca volvulus ; Ascaris lumbricoides; Anisakis simplex; and tropomyosin from the blood fluke Schistosoma mansoni is also a human IgE antigen. Tropomyosin is highly conserved across many invertebrates and is responsible for much of the IgE cross-reactivity between Ascaris and dust-mites.

I haven’t found any good  answer to this question. As tropomyosin affects contractility – this seems like “shooting into the leg” of worms whenever they attempt to invade.

Maybe Gour et al. did not know the earlier dissertation from Berlin that already showed a reduced inflammation in the OVA mouse model by administration of recombinant tropomyosin.

The broad cross reactivity to tropomyosin gives rise to the question if helminth tropomyosin could induce allergic reactions to itself and/or tropomyosin of different organisms. Considering the fact that filarial nematodes express tropomyosin on their surface […] and that the continuing turnover of microfilariae confronts the host with relevant amounts of tropomyosin makes this question even more appropriate.

Worms seems to be attacked by anti-worm-surface-tropomyosin IgE whenever the worm tries to invade  the epithelium during an acute infection. During invasion extracellular IL33 is cleaved into a shorter form with enhanced activity attracting more immune cells.
During chronic infestation nothing happens as long as the worm does not invade and doesn’t trigger any IL33 alarmin. As there is continuous tropomyosin antigen antigen contact, the host is slowly desensitzed, clearing IgE in favor of IgG4.

Is this also a model that explains allergy? We don’t know the details but maybe this antigen recognition / response system is being disturbed where allergens like Der p1 mimicking a worm infection by tropomyosin can trigger the allergic reaction in particular as Der p1 a cysteine protease also mimicks an invasion signal.

23.12.2019 Addendum

Parasite tropomyosin ist detected in in 55%-62% of patients (cockroach tropomyosin rPer a 7, Ascaris tropomyosin rAsc l 3).

Allergy, Vitamins

A step forward in allergy research

The most recent paper of my Australian collaborators is a relevant step forward: Polymorphisms affecting vitamin D-binding protein modify the relationship between serum vitamin D (25[OH]D3) and food allergy. Basically they show an

… association between serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 (25[OH]D3) levels and food allergy at age 1 year (338 challenge-proven food-allergic and 269 control participants) and age 2 years (55 participants with persistent and 50 participants with resolved food allergy)… Analyses were stratified by genotype at rs7041 as a proxy marker of DBP levels… Low serum 25(OH)D3 level (<50 nM/L) at age 1 years was associated with food allergy, particularly among infants with the GG genotype (odds ratio [OR], 6.0; 95% CI, 0.9-38.9) … Maternal antenatal vitamin D supplementation was associated with less food allergy, particularly in infants with the GT/TT genotype (OR, 0.10; 95% CI, 0.03-0.41)… This increases the biological plausibility of a role for vitamin D in the development of food allergy.

Maybe it would be helpful to have also “real” DBP levels for estimating bioavailability (and even data of supplement use) but already the reported results are another strong argument for the vitamin D – allergy axis. This is also largely in line with what I predicted back in 2012

Both vitamin D insufficiency and vitamin D supplementation have been linked to allergy and asthma. This apparent paradox is explained by epigenetic programming in pregnancy by low vitamin D levels and the excessive high supplementation in the newborn period.

Maybe I should have emphasized that genetic variants in the vitamin D pathway are also important for biological effects.

Allergy

Is this a retraction of the hygiene hypothesis?

There are news about the hygiene hypothesis.

Home cleanliness resulted only in quantitative reduction of floor dust, which mainly indicates removal of superficial dirt with a rather cosmetic effect. Conventional cleaning does not eradicate microorganisms sustainably, because emptied microbial niches are instantly recolonized by ventilation and living carrier.

Sure. Continue reading Is this a retraction of the hygiene hypothesis? →

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 →

Allergy, Philosophy, Vitamins

Shift happens

The current issue of the blue journal has more stuff on the vitamin D hypothesis (that has been shifted recently into the opposite direction). I agree with the editorial that

Intervention studies of vitamin D in the primary prevention and treatment of asthma raise a number of difficult scientific, ethical, and regulatory issues.

That may be true while the editorial includes the widely quoted myth that immunological effects occur only at high doses Continue reading Shift happens →

Allergy, Genetics

Asthma is a iatrogenic disease

1 Comment

The new Lancet has a paper from our own group as well as another one from ISAAC. We have already suggested earlier that asthma is a iatrogenic disease- the ISAAC paper now confirms at least the long suspected association with paracetamol use – gratulations to my London friend who had been working so long on this hypothesis. The accompanying editorial puts in into context:

Furthermore, although many important potential confounders were included in multivariate analyses, confounding by underlying respiratory disease, differences in hygiene, and use of other antipyretics might also explain the findings.

To put it more on a general level – more iatrogenic factors cannot be excluded, yea, yea.

Allergy

Dung hill counting

Wikipedia writes about Imre Lakatos the famous Hungarian mathematician and philosopher who graduated 1961 in Cambridge with “Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery”

He showed that in some cases one research programme can be described as progressive while its rivals are degenerative. A progressive research programme is marked by its growth, along with the discovery of stunning novel facts, development of new experimental techniques, more precise predictions, etc. A degenerative research program is marked by lack of growth, or growth of the protective belt that does not lead to novel facts.

 

One of these degenerate research program relates to the hypothesis that farming protects you from allergy

E 2006:

There is increasing evidence that environmental exposures determining childhood illnesses operate early in life. Prenatal exposure to a farming environment through the mother might also play an important role … Both atopic sensitization … and the gene expression of receptors of innate immunity were strongly determined by maternal exposure to stables during pregnancy, whereas current exposures had much weaker or no effects … Each additional farm animal species increased the expression of TLR2, TLR4, and CD14 by a factor of 1.16

Keep in mind – it’s the farm animal.

K 2008:

Several epidemiological studies have shown that the farm environment impacts allergy protection mechanisms in children … In investigating the link between farming lifestyle and prevention of childhood allergy, we examined the prevalence of Listeria spp. in dust specimens from the environment of rural children … The dominant species found by culturing methods were L. innocua (n=12) and L. monocytogenes (n=8).

Sorry – it’s listeria.

K 2006:

There is increasing evidence that the farming environment has a protective effect as regards allergic diseases. Exposure to animal parasites, particularly helminth infections, is common in the farming environment. Exposure to nematodes, as determined by the levels of antibody to A. lumbricoides, was more frequent among farmers’ children than non-farmers’ children… This positive serology was found to be significantly associated with high total IgE levels … and eosinophilia.

Sorry again – it’s ascaris.


E 2007:

In recent years, studies have shown a protective effect of being raised in a farm environment on the development of hay fever and atopic sensitization…Inverse relations with a diagnosis of asthma were found for pig keeping …, farm milk consumption …, frequent stay in animal sheds …, child’s involvement in haying …, and use of silage … Protective factors were related with higher expression levels of genes of the innate immunity.

Sorry, it’s everything: the pig, the milk, haying and silage.

W 2007:

Some studies in rural environments claimed an inverse association between consumption of farm-produced dairy products … Farm milk consumption ever in life showed a statistically significant inverse association with asthma… rhinoconjunctivitis … and sensitization to pollen and the food mix fx5 …, and sensitization to horse dander.

Hey, milky ways ahead something new: the horse!

K 2007:

There is still uncertainty about the determinants of atopic eczema … In multivariate analyses, helping with haying was the only variable related to a farming environment having a consistent inverse association with both current symptoms and a doctor’s diagnosis of AE.

Yes,  haying makes sense with hayfever.

W 2005:

An increasing number of studies report pet exposure to be associated with lower risk of asthma and allergies … Current contact with dogs was inversely associated with diagnosed hay fever (OR 0.26, 95% CI 0.11-0.57), diagnosed asthma (OR 0.29, 95% CI 0.12-0.71), sensitization…

Oh no, the dog.

V 2008:

Numerous epidemiologic studies have demonstrated an allergy-protective effect of farm life early in childhood …In vitro, B. licheniformis spores activated a T(H)1 cytokine expression profile. In vivo application of these spores resulted in less spore-specific but long-lasting immune activation preventing eosinophilia and goblet cell hyperplasia; however, they provoked an influx of neutrophils in lung tissue of asthmatic mice.

What about bacillus spores?

vM 2008

Contact with farm animals, at least in childhood, likely confers protection; other factors have not been completely identified. Also, the consumption of milk directly from the farm during childhood has been shown to be beneficial with respect to childhood asthma and allergies.

Ok, it is milk. Are you still readings here?

This week I am back with the most exciting research

Previous cross-sectional surveys have suggested that maternal exposure to animal sheds during pregnancy exerted a protective effect on atopic sensitization in children lasting until school age … Different sensitization patterns in cord blood of farm and nonfarm children were observed. In multivariable analysis consumption of boiled, but not unboiled, farm milk during pregnancy was positively associated with specific IgE to cow’s milk independently from maternal IgE.

This paper counts dung hills The authors even invent a new classification (sorry, not dung hill height but “50 m distance between dung hill and house”).

And did you also wonder why paternal history is no more a risk in thesel studies? There are only a few allergic parent due to healthy worker effect…
No adjustment for multiple testing “because it will lead to fewer errors of interpretation when the data under evaluation are not random numbers but actual observations on nature” That is one of the most stupid sentences I have ever read.

The overall response rate in this study is 32% and the strongest risk for cord blood IgE is maternal IgE. Is there any statistical model that can account for poor data by contamination of newborn cord blood with maternal IgE? And uhh, 32% response is that really a representative sample?

Did you notice that being a farm child now suddenly becomes a risk for seasonal sensitization (OR=1.18, NS) and food allergy as well (OR=1.25, NS)? And that farm milk consumption is suddenly a risk! for IgE to cow’s milk (OR=3.64, p=0.01)?

The mantra at the beginning at each of the abstract above is certainly necessary to let us believe in the rest of these papers.

Addendum 8/8/2008
Poster E3269: Prenatal exposure to a farm environment affects atopic sensitization at birth at ERS Berlin Tuesday, October 7, 2008.

Furthermore, inverse associations of CB IgE to seasonal allergens with positive maternal records for Toxoplasma (T.) gondii (adjusted odds ratio = 0.37 [0.17-0.81]) and rubella virus (adjusted odds ratio = 0.35 [0.13-0.96]) were found.

gotcha – Toxoplasma + Rubella.

Addendum 11/12/2009
a new paper & a new cowshed derived bacterium: Acinetobacter

Using the cowshed-derived bacterium Acinetobacter lwoffii F78 together with a mouse model of experimental allergic airway inflammation, this study investigated the hygiene hypothesis.

Addendum 28/2/2011
a new press release Eurotium

Mikrobielle Vielfalt allein reicht vermutlich allerdings nicht aus, um Asthma zu verhindern. Wahrscheinlich ist es eine Kombination spezifischer Arten, die eine Schutzwirkung entfalten kann. „Im gesamten untersuchten Spektrum fanden sich einige Keime, die besonders interessant sein könnten”, berichtet Ege, „dazugehören außer bestimmten Bazillen und Staphylokokken – etwa die Art Staphylococcus sciuri – auch Schimmelpilze der Gattung Eurotium.“

Addendum 1/1/2018
The research above has now lead to the highest German Science Prize, an honorary doctorate, an ERC advanced grant, a Leopoldina and Bavarian Academy membership.