Source: Annual Congress 2002 - Epidemiology of asthma, rhinitis and allergy
Disease area: Airway diseases

Abstract

Objective: To compare patterns of genetic and environmental influences on variation in liability for self reported asthma, hay fever and eczema with those for symptoms of the same diseases.
Methods: A cross sectional study of all Norwegian twins born from 1967 through 1979, N=12700. The response rate was 69% and included 3300 pairs. Structural equation modelling was used to estimate the genetic and environmental components of variance for the allergic diseases and symptoms.
Results: The prevalence of asthma was 8.1%, hay fever 13.9% and eczema 6.0%. The prevalence of wheeze was 15.8%, sneeze 31.8% and itch 14.9%. For all disease categories, the concordances and the correlations were consistently higher among monozygotic (MZ) than among dizygotic (DZ) twins, indicating that genetic effects were important in the pathogenesis of the diseases. A similar pattern was found for each of the reported symptoms. However, the differences between MZ and DZ correlations were not as great as for the diseases. This suggests a greater role of environmental influences for the occurrence of symptoms. The modelling results confirmed the pattern of effects indicated by the tetrachoric correlations. Genetic effects were substantial for the atopic diseases (69-72%), and were much more moderate for the symptoms (38-55%). The remaining variation for diseases and for symptoms was mainly due to non-shared environmental effects.
Conclusion: Environmental sources of influence are significantly more important for the symptom outcomes, whereas genetic effects are stronger for the diseases. Reported allergic diseases versus symptoms appear to measure somewhat different aspects of illness.

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Citations should be made in the following way:
W. Nystad, J. Harris, E. Røysamb, P. Magnus (Oslo, Norway). Do allergic diseases and symptoms show the same pattern of genetic and environmental influences?. Eur Respir J 2002; 20: Suppl. 38, 798

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