Measuring Environmental Chitin and Allergen Levels to Predict Pediatric Asthma Risk

Abstract

Our primary objective in this project was to analyze dust samples obtained from the Inner-City Anti-IgE Therapy for Asthma study, a 60-week pediatric asthma study which evaluated changes in asthma symptoms in inner-city children during a treatment course with an experimental Anti-IgE medication. During the study, children submitted household dust samples for analysis. When the study was completed, we obtained these dust samples and developed a novel assay to quantify their levels of chitin, a common household allergen. Using statistical software, we compared clinical data obtained during the ICATA study to our analyses of the patient-matched dust samples. We found that dust sample chitin concentration significantly correlates with severity of self-reported sleep-interrupting and activity-limiting asthma symptoms with p-values of 0.001 and 0.018, respectively. We also found that dust mite allergen Der p 1 correlates to continuous and bimodal chitin with p-values 0.035 and 0.0474, respectively, and cockroach allergen Bla g 1 correlates to continuous and bimodal chitin with p-values 0.0016 and 0.0335, respectively. From these data, we conclude that our chitin assay may be a promising tool with which to evaluate the risk of asthma development in indoor environments.