New data bank for childhood research
01 March 2005

A unique Asthma UK research initiative launched today (1 March) could help to identify factors in early childhood that cause asthma.

The 'Asthma Phenobank' project will collate information from seven research projects around the UK, specifically from birth cohorts – groups of children whose health is tracked from birth, including details of family history and home environment. One cohort alone, from Bristol, comprises 14,000 families.

Scientists will then use this huge bank of information to identify variations in asthma according to onset and history, and look for common factors and events within these variations. It is the first time data has been analysed on this scale, and it is believed that this process should lead to greater understanding of the factors that can cause children to develop asthma.

'There appears to be increasing evidence suggesting that certain events, which happen to the baby in the womb or soon after birth will often determine whether that child will go on to develop asthma,' said Philippa Major, Asthma UK's Assistant Director of Research.

'Because of this, Asthma UK has decided to prioritise research on the influence of early life events in the development of asthma.'
Factors that may influence the development of asthma

Different factors that will be explored during the Phenobank project include:

• Before birth: maternal health, nutrition during pregnancy, medicines taken during pregnancy, mother's smoking history;
• At birth: gestation, birth weight, neonatal problems, feeding history;
• Early childhood exposures: home environment – damp, moulds, crowding, second-hand smoke, socio-economic conditions, childhood nutrition, pet ownership, place of residence;
• Other health issues: symptoms in early childhood, features of other allergic disorders, visits to GPs and /hospital and medication use.

Complexities of the increase in asthma

'Asthma is a complex disease and it is likely that a large number of genes are involved,' said Dr John Henderson from Bristol University, who is leading the Phenobank study. 'But the observed rise in asthma over the last few decades in many westernised countries can't be explained by genetic changes in the population.

'A great deal of research interest has focused on the search for environmental exposures that are associated with the development of asthma but, despite this activity, the emergence of a single modifiable factor that is likely to have a major impact on asthma prevalence has yet to occur.

'To disentangle all the complexities requires access to a detailed source of information on asthma patients built up over a number of years…. This proposal provides these possibilities.'

New asthma expert network

The Phenobank is the first project of a new UK network of asthma specialists, the Study Team for Early Life Asthma Research (STELAR), formed by Asthma UK in response to its consultation on priorities for basic asthma research which revealed the importance of studying early life influences on the development of asthma.

The STELAR team includes experts drawn from Bristol, London, Manchester, Aberdeen, Southampton, Ashford and the Isle of Wight, and will be led by Professor Ashley Woodcock of Manchester University.