Researcher Discovers What’s Behind the Dust Mite-Asthma Connection
In what the American Asthma Foundation calls a “breakthrough discovery,” a research team led by Christopher Karp, MD, has found out how the tiny household pests called dust mites are a major source of airborne allergens for patients with allergic asthma.
Dust mites are known to cause asthma attacks, but until this study it wasn’t known what prompted the response to mites to be so strong.
Allergic asthma results from maladaptive immune responses to specifc, ubiquitous environmental proteins. Why particular proteins are recognized this way by the immune system, as opposed to being ignored, has been unclear. With dust mites, a protein in dust mite fecal droppings is a functional mimic of a host protein involved in sensing the presence of microbial infection, the researchers wrote in a study published online at Nature.com. This tricks the immune system into a strong immune response against an otherwise innocuous protein, driving the allergic response.
Karp, director of Molecular Immunology at Cincinnati Children’s, received a three-year senior investigator award in 2006 from the asthma foundation’s strategic program in causes of asthma, with the goal of improving treatment and curing and preventing the disease.
According to the American Asthma Foundation, nearly one in every 13 people in the United States has asthma, making it more common than coronary heart disease, cancer or Parkinson's disease. Asthma is the most serious chronic disease of childhood and disproportionately strikes the poor.
