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Longitudinal Associations between Respiratory Infections and Asthma in Young Children.

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posted on 2018-05-09, 13:17 authored by Alban Ramette, Ben D Spycher, Jingying Wang, Myrofora Goutaki, Caroline S. Beardsmore, Claudia E Kuehni
We examined temporal dependencies between repeated assessments of respiratory infections and asthma in children in the Leicester Respiratory Cohort, Leicestershire, UK. Asthma (doctor diagnosis, health care visits, wheeze frequency) and respiratory infections (cold duration and frequency, cough with colds, ear infections) in the previous 12 months were assessed repeatedly at ages 1, 4, and 6 years for children born between April 1996 and April 1997. We determined associations between contemporaneous and lagged measures of asthma and respiratory infections using structural equation modelling. In 1995 children, asthma was positively associated with contemporaneous infections. Asthma at age 6 was positively associated with asthma at age 4 (regression coefficient = 0.87; 95% CI 0.76, 0.97), but not with asthma at age 1 (-0.01; -0.14, 0.11). We found no evidence for direct protective effect of infections at age 1 on asthma either at age 4 (-0.20; -0.51, 0.10) or 6 (0.24; -0.04, 0.52). Adjusting for potential confounders did not qualitatively change those relationships. Our findings suggest that asthma at age 6 is directly influenced by asthma history and only indirectly if, at all, by earlier infection episodes. We found little support for a protective effect of preschool infections on asthma at early school age.

History

Citation

American Journal of Epidemiology, 2018, in press

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF LIFE SCIENCES/School of Medicine/Department of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

American Journal of Epidemiology

Publisher

Oxford University Press

issn

0002-9262

eissn

1476-6256

Acceptance date

2018-03-07

Copyright date

2018

Available date

2019-03-13

Publisher version

https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwy053/4931689

Notes

The file associated with this record is under embargo until 12 months after publication, in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above.

Language

en

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