Asthma Research Does Not Help Nor Apply To Black Children

Asthma Research Does Not Help Nor Apply To Black Children

A new study from the University of California San Francisco shows that most asthma research done in the U.S. may not apply to African American children….

Results from the largest single study of the genetic and environmental causes of asthma in African-American children suggest that only a tiny fraction of known genetic risk factors for the disease apply to this population, raising concerns for clinicians and scientists working to stem the asthma epidemic among African-Americans.

At the same time, the research also identified new genetic risk factors for asthma in these children, a critical first step toward improving diagnosis and treatment. Ongoing research is digging further into this data to investigate a link between these new risk factors and asthma severity and drug response, two major contributors to asthma mortality.

“Almost all the genetic studies of asthma have been done using white patients only, but you can’t assume these results will apply to other ethnic groups,” said study senior author Esteban Burchard, MD, MPH, a professor in the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, director of the UCSF Asthma Collaboratory lab and a member of President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative. “This paper is an important first step towards truly understanding the biology of asthma in African-Americans.”

More work remains to confirm whether the genetic risk factors for asthma identified in previous studies are truly absent in African-Americans or merely too subtle to be detected in the current study, the authors say, but the results clearly show the biology of asthma is different black children and previously studied groups.

Read more from the study HERE. Discuss…

UCSF