The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice
Original ArticleThe Role of Early Life Food Sensitization in Adolescent Lung Function: Results from 2 Birth Cohort Studies
Section snippets
Study populations
MACS is an Australian allergy high-risk birth cohort study that recruited 620 neonates with a family history of asthma, food allergy, hay fever, or eczema between 1990 and 1994 from Melbourne. Detailed descriptions of the recruitment and data collection have been previously published.13, 14, 15, 16 Baseline information was collected during pregnancy. Questionnaires were completed every 4 weeks until 15 months, at 18 months, 2 years, and then annually until age 7, then at 12 and 18 years.
MACS
Characteristics of participants
The baseline demographic characteristics of the MACS participants have been published previously.35 This analysis was restricted to those who had data on both sensitization and lung function testing (364 participants [59% of original cohort] at 12 years and 399 participants [64% of original cohort] at 18 years). The characteristics of those included participants are presented in Table I. With the exception of a higher proportion of highly educated parents, MACS participants who attended lung
Discussion
We observed that early life sensitization to food allergens at 6 and 12 months was associated with lower spirometry indices during adolescence. Effects were detected mainly for FEV1 and FEV1/FVC ratio. These associations were neither confounded by concurrent wheezing nor modified by subsequent asthma status. Furthermore, these associations were only partially mediated by asthma at 6 years, and not by aeroallergen sensitization at age 2. This is the first study that evaluated the association
Acknowledgments
For MACS study, we thank Dr John Thorburn, FRACP, for assistance in patient recruitment and administrative assistance and the Mercy Maternity Hospital Department of Obstetrics for participant recruitment, and Dr Cliff Hosking for study leadership up to the 12-year follow-up. We thank Anne Balloch for assistance with data management. Most importantly, we thank all of the MACS children and parents for their participation and ongoing support for this study. We thank all the families for their
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Cited by (0)
Initial funding for the Melbourne Atopy Cohort Study (MACS) in the first 6 years of the study was from Nestec (a subsidiary of Nestlé Australia). The 12-year follow-up was supported by the Asthma Foundation of Victoria. The 18-year follow-up was supported by grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia (MACS grant no. APP454856). The funding bodies had no role in the study design, collection, analysis, or interpretation of data, nor in writing this paper or the decision to publish. The results, conclusions, and opinions reported in the paper are those of the authors and are independent from the funding sources. The “influence of Life-style–related factors on the development of the Immune System and Allergies in East and West Germany plus the influence of traffic emissions and genetics” (LISAplus) study was mainly supported by grants from the Federal Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Technology and in addition from Helmholtz Zentrum Munich (former GSF), Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, Leipzig, Research Institute at Marien-Hospital Wesel, Pediatric Practice, Bad Honnef for the first 2 years. The 4-year, 6-year, 10-year, and 15-year follow-up examinations of the LISAplus study were covered from the respective budgets of the involved partners (Helmholtz Zentrum Munich [former GSF], Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, Leipzig, Research Institute at Marien-Hospital Wesel, Pediatric Practice, Bad Honnef, IUF—Leibniz-Research Institute for Environmental Medicine at the University of Düsseldorf) and in addition by a grant from the Federal Ministry for Environment (IUF Düsseldorf, FKZ 20462296). Furthermore, the 15-year follow-up examination of the LISAplus study was supported by the Commission of the European Communities, the 7th Framework Program: MeDALL project.
Conflicts of interest: The authors declare that they have no relevant conflicts of interest.
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These authors share senior authorship.