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Asthma is the most common chronic childhood disorder and has been increasing steadily in prevalence since the early 1980s. In the United States, asthma prevalence, morbidity, mortality, and drug response vary substantially among racial and ethnic groups. While asthma is traditionally thought of as a single clinical entity with a number of diagnostic criteria, researchers now think asthma represents multiple different pathobiological and clinical subtypes, which may explain the disparities among different ethnic and racial groups.
To investigate asthma risk factors and clinical subtypes in minority children, CUNY SPH Distinguished Professor Luisa N. Borrell was awarded a R01 grant by the National Institutes of Health.
The four-year, $735,984-per-year award will fund a study of a unique cohort of minority children at the extremes of asthma prevalence and mortality (high-risk Puerto Ricans and African Americans, and low-risk Mexican Americans), who have existing demographic data, clinical and social exposures, genotypes, and RNA/DNA sequences.
Borrell seeks to identify cell types, genes, and pathways altered by exposure to social and clinical risk factors in order to better understand how asthma subtypes work and elucidating the underlying networks by which these risk factors affect asthma disparities.
“Our findings will provide the clinical and biomedical research communities with the largest methylation dataset on minority children produced to date,” Borrell says. “Physicians will be able to better treat patients by selecting interventions using epigenetic markers accounting for social and clinical risk factors.”
