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Dog ownership in infancy is protective for persistent wheeze in 17q21 asthma-risk carriers

Published: October 20, 2022

Pet ownership has long been thought to be an important environmental factor in asthma, but extensive studies failed to identify an association. Moreover, gene-pet ownership interaction studies showed discordant results, likely due to small sample sizes.

The Study Team for Early Life Asthma Research (STELAR) consortium, using latent class analysis on harmonised longitudinal data collected from birth to age 18 years on > 15,000 well-characterised study participants, divided the participants into homogeneous longitudinal wheezing clusters. Tutino et al. aimed to identify an interaction between the most replicated asthma-risk region, 17q12-q21, and cat and dog ownership in infancy with respect to these longitudinal wheezing patterns. The multiplicative interaction odds ratio (ORint, interpretable as the ratio of the adjusted stratum specific odds ratios, e.g. ORDogOwners/ORNoPetOwners) with 95% CIs were modelled by multinomial logistic regression. Results were published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI).

In line with previous studies, for the whole population, no association was identified between dog and cat ownership in the first year of life and any of the wheezing clusters. Conversely, when the interaction between genotype and pet ownership was investigated, a significant interaction was identified between the 17q12-q21 asthma risk region and dog ownership with respect to persistent wheeze. Amongst children who had dogs in the home in the first year of life, carrying the risk genotype was not associated with an increased risk of persistent wheeze. In contrast, amongst those children not exposed to dogs, the risk genotype was consistently associated with an increased risk of persistent wheeze.

Early life environmental exposures may therefore attenuate the likelihood of persistent wheeze in those carrying asthma-risk genotypes.

The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI) is an official scientific journal of the AAAAI, and is the most-cited journal in the field of allergy and clinical immunology.

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