Published ahead of print on September 14, 2006, doi:10.1164/rccm.200605-596OC Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med., Volume 174, Number 10, November 2006, 1088-1093 A more recent version of this article appeared on November 15, 2006
Submitted on May 2, 2006 Ancestry-environment Interactions and Asthma Risk among Puerto RicansShweta Choudhry1,1 University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2 Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, School of Dental and Oral Surgery, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, 3 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA, 4 San Juan VAMC, University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, San Juan, PR, USA, 5 Department of Biology, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, PR, USA, 6 Division of Allergy-Immunology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA, 7 University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, CA, USA * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: esteban{at}sfgh.ucsf.edu.
Rationale: Puerto Ricans, an admixed population of African, European and Native American ancestries, have the highest asthma prevalence, morbidity and mortality rates of any U.S. population. Although socioeconomic status (SES) is negatively correlated with asthma incidence in most populations, no such relationship has been identified among Puerto Ricans. Objective: To test the hypothesis that in this admixed population the association between SES and asthma may interact with genetic ancestry. Methods: We analyzed 135 Puerto Rican asthma cases and 156 controls recruited from 6 different recruitment centers in Puerto Rico. Individual ancestry for each subject was estimated using 44 ancestry informative markers. SES was assigned using the census tracts' median family income. Analyses of SES were based both on the SES of the clinic site from which the subjects were recruited and on a subset of individuals on whom home address-based SES was available. Measurements and Main Results: In the two (independent) analyses, we found a significant interaction between SES, ancestry and asthma disease status. At lower SES, European ancestry was associated with increased risk of asthma while African ancestry was associated with decreased risk. The opposite was true for their higher SES counterparts. Conclusions: The observed interaction may help to explain the unique pattern of risk for asthma in Puerto Ricans, and the lack of association with SES observed in previous studies when not accounting for varying proportions of ancestry. Key words: Ancestry, Socioeconomic Status, Asthma, Puerto Ricans, Environment
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
