Prenatal and postnatal cigarette smoke exposure enhances the risk of developing asthma. Despite this as well as other smoking related risks, 11% of women still smoke during pregnancy. We hypothesized that cigarette smoke exposure during prenatal development generates long lasting differential methylation altering transcriptional activity that correlates with disease. In a house dust mite (HDM) ...

BACKGROUND House dust mites (HDM) are one of the major risk factors for the development of bronchial asthma. The percentage of sensitization to HDM was reported to be 71.9% in Taipei City. In southwestern Taiwan, the percentage of sensitization to HDM has not been estimated. We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of asthmatic patients treated at the Chiayi branch of Chang Gung Memorial...

Advances in digital technologies for information capture combined with massive increases in the capacity of digital storage media mean that it is now possible to capture and store one’s entire life experiences in a Human Digital Memory (HDM). Information can be captured from a myriad of personal information devices including desktop computers, PDAs, digital cameras, video and audio recorders, a...

BACKGROUND House dust mite (HDM) allergy is a frequent cause of allergic asthma in children. Reduction of exposure seems to be the most logical way to treat these patients. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to investigate whether mattress and pillow encasings resulted in an effective long-term control of HDM allergen levels, thereby reducing the need for asthma medication in children with asthma and HDM ...

BACKGROUND Infants who develop house dust mite (HDM) allergy and HDM-sensitised children with severe persistent asthma have low antibody responses to the P6 antigen of Haemophilus influenzae. OBJECTIVE To measure the development of antibody to two ubiquitous bacteria of the respiratory mucosa in a prospective birth cohort at high risk of allergic disease and to assess which responses are asso...

Increases in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) have been associated with the severity of airway thickening in chronic asthmatic subjects, and EGFR signaling is induced by asthma-related cytokines and inflammation. The goal of this study was to determine the role of EGFR signaling in a chronic allergic model of asthma and specifically in epithelial cells, which are increasingly recogni...

In this paper, a comprehensive algorithm is developed to analyze the sensitivity of hierarchical decision models (HDM), including the analytic hierarchy process and its variants, to single and multiple changes in the local contribution matrices at any level of the decision hierarchy. The algorithm is applicable to all HDM that use an additive function to derive the overall contribution vector. ...

BACKGROUND Models that incorporate patterns of multiple cytokine responses to allergens, rather than individual cytokine production, may better predict sensitization and asthma. OBJECTIVE To characterize the patterns of peripheral blood mononuclear cells' (PBMCs) cytokine responses to house dust mite (HDM) allergens among children from two population-based birth cohorts using machine learning...