Leveraging gene-environment interactions and endotypes for asthma gene discovery.

ABSTRACT: Asthma is a heterogeneous clinical syndrome that includes subtypes of disease with different underlying causes and disease mechanisms. Asthma is caused by a complex interaction between genes and environmental exposures; early-life exposures in particular play an important role. Asthma is also heritable, and a number of susceptibility variants have been discovered in genome-wide association studies, although the known risk alleles explain only a small proportion of the heritability. In this review, we present evidence supporting the hypothesis that focusing on more specific asthma phenotypes, such as childhood asthma with severe exacerbations, and on relevant exposures that are involved in gene-environment interactions (GEIs), such as rhinovirus infections, will improve detection of asthma

SUBMITTER: Bonnelykke K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5004762 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature