clair088

Childhood asthma is a common and costly chronic medical condition, affecting 7 million children and leading to more than 50 billion dollars in direct healthcare costs every year.  It is particularly burdensome for non-Hispanic black and Puerto Rican children, who are four times as likely to visit the Emergency Department (ED) as non-Hispanic white children.  In this month’s issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Martin and colleagues review strategies to bridge care from the ED to home and ambulatory settings, like primary care providers ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(6): 1518-1525 ).   They divide these strategies into two domains: care coordination and self-management education. Five studies were identified regarding care coordination.  Three involved improved scheduling for follow up appointments, one involved allergen skin testing in the ED, and one involved use of a template to improve adherence to guidelines in the ED.  In all fi...

Asthma is a devastating chronic disease that affects up to 24 million Americans.  It is more severe and prevalent among African Americans and Hispanics, especially Puerto Ricans.  There’s a two-fold increase in asthma mortality in Hispanic children and three-fold among African Americans, compared to Whites.  The causes of these disparities are complex, but are undoubtedly worsened by the observation that they are less likely to be treated according to the National Asthma Education Prevention Program (NAEPP) guidelines, which have been widely available for the past 20 years.  To address these issues, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) funded 8 studies to help patients and clinicians adhere to the guidelines.  In this month’s issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Anise and colleagues review these 8 randomized control trials ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(6): 1503-1510 ). Among the approaches being used are (1) clinician...

Asthma is a huge public health problem in the United States today.  But all asthmatics are not affected equally – there are a lot of disparities in asthma care.  In this month’s issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Bryant-Stephens and colleagues describe the need for home visits to address these asthma health disparities ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(6): 1526-1530 ).  They note that most of the research on asthma so far has been on patients who go to clinics.  This has meant that people who have problems getting to the clinic, like the elderly, disabled, and those with other chronic conditions are often left out.  To help prevent overlooking these blindspots, they advocate for the involvement of community health workers.  In particular, they describe the experiences of three community health workers when they visited patients.  They found that the challenges at home are often overwhelming.  Social stressors in patients’ li...

Over the past 25 years, the rates of both obesity and asthma have increased dramatically.  These are related to one another, with a 92% increased risk of asthma in people whose body mass index (BMI) exceeds 30 kg/m 2 . People who do lose weight through bariatric surgery or dietary restriction, tend to show improvement in their bronchial hyperresponsiveness, the major feature of asthma.  The reason for this correlation is not well understood.  IL-33, a intercellular messenger that skews helper T cells towards allergies, is produced by fat cells.  IL33 also induces type 2 and type 3 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2 and ILC3), two more recently identified sets of immune cells in fat and the lungs.  In this month’s issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Everaere and colleagues use mouse models to investigate the roles of innate lymphoid cells in the correlation between asthma and obesity ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(5): 1309-1318 ).  The mice...

Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) is an allergic disorder seen in approximately 1 out of 2000 people in the United States.  Young children often present with vomiting and failure to thrive, while older children and adults may have difficulties swallowing, food impaction, or strictures in their esophagus.  Despite increasing awareness and diagnosis, the etiology remains unclear.  Past studies support the role of a subset of Helper T-cells, called TH2 cells, which are also present in many other allergic diseases, including atopic dermatitis (AD).  In fact, approximately half of patients with EoE have AD.  But why is that so? In this month’s issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Venturelli and colleagues investigate the role of abnormal skin barriers in the development of EoE, and, in particular, the role of IL-33, a chemical messenger whose levels are elevated in both EoE and AD ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(5): 1367-1380 ).  They also in...

Chronic Rhinosinusitis is a chronic disease of the sinuses that’s seen in up to 27% of adults in Europe and 14% in the United States.  Grouped in two categories, chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyposis (CRwNP) and chronic rhinosinusitis without nasal polyposis (CRsNP), chronic rhinosinusitis appears to be mediated by very distinct immune mechanisms.  Interestingly, there are differences in the clinical presentations between ethnic groups as well as in the types and levels of cytokines produced by immune cells.  Wang and colleagues expand upon this prior knowledge by looking at 435 patients with chronic rhinosinusitis, and comparing them to 138 control subjects ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(5): 1344-1353 ) .  They were recruited from six regions covering Europe, Australia, and Asia.  They checked the levels of cytokines, inflammatory mediators and IgE, the antibody mediating allergies, from the mucosa of subjects.  The levels of these parameters wer...

Asthma is an incredibly variable disease with its impact on people and molecular and cellular mechanisms what it does to the lungs and rest of the body.  This month’s issue of JACI features three articles by Zoratti et al ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(4): 1016-1029 ), Pongracic et al ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(4): 1030-1041 ), and Liu et al ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(4): 1042-1050 ), covering asthma among inner city children.  They examine factors that determine the phenotype, severity and disease control, based on data they obtained from the Asthma Phenotypes in the Inner City (APIC) study, which looked at children aged 6 to 17 years and examined them every 2 months for one year.  Even though their techniques are all slightly different, all three analyses determined that allergic inflammation was a very significant contributor to disease.  In addition to rhinitis, pulmonary physiology also influenced severity and ability to control asthma despit...