Abstract
Introduction: Children with coexisting asthma and rhinitis have more polysensitization than those with asthma or rhinitis alone. These associations remain poorly studied in older populations.
Aims: We investigated the association between IgE sensitization patterns towards a large variety of respiratory allergen components and asthma and rhinitis multimorbidity in adults of the French EGEA cohort and adolescents of the Swedish BAMSE birth cohort.
Methods: IgE reactivity to microarrayed allergens was determined for 64 respiratory allergen molecules with the MeDALL-chip in samples from EGEA (n=840, age=40.7±17.1yrs) and BAMSE (n=786, age=16yrs). Asthma and rhinitis were defined by questionnaire and four groups were identified, with their respective prevalences in EGEA and BAMSE: no asthma&no rhinitis (A-R-; 30% and 54%), asthma alone (A+R-; 11% and 8%), rhinitis alone (A-R+; 15% and 24%), and asthma+rhinitis (A+R+; 44% and 14%). The age- and sex-adjusted associations between the number of IgE-reactivities (≥0.3 ISU) and the asthma-rhinitis phenotypes were assessed using a negative binomial model.
Results: The numbers of IgE-reactivities significantly differed between the phenotypes (median values in A-R-, A+R-, A-R+ and A+R+ were 0, 1, 2 and 7 in EGEA and 0, 0, 3, and 5 in BAMSE). As compared to A-R- subjects, the adjusted ratio of the mean number of IgE-reactivities was higher in A+R+ than in A+R- or A-R+ (10.0, 5.4 and 5.0 in EGEA and 7.2, 0.7 and 4.8 in BAMSE).
Conclusion: In two different populations, we showed that the asthma-plus-rhinitis multimorbidity is associated with multiple sensitizations to respiratory allergens, and that the phenotype can be generalized to any age.
- Copyright ©the authors 2017