​Severe Asthma Research Program
A National Institutes of Health/ National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute sponsored network

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Age and Gender​

1.     Teague WG, et al. Baseline Features of the Severe Asthma Research Program (SARP III) Cohort: Differences with Age, The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice, doi:10.1016/j.jaip.2017.05.032 PubMed PMID: 28866107. 

The goal of this project was to examine the baseline features of children and adults with severe and non-severe asthma enrolled in the SARP long-term study.  We thought it would be interesting to see how these features are different with age and whether or not there was an interaction between age and asthma severity in regards to any one feature.  We discovered that severe asthma in children is highly associated with inflammatory factors like allergy, blood eosinophils, and expired nitric oxide, but the degree of allergic sensitization was not different in children with severe compared to non-severe asthma.  At entry into the SARP program, adults with asthma had overall lower inflammatory factors compared to children, but with age those factors were relatively higher in adults with severe compared to non-severe asthma.  What was most different in adults compared to children with severe asthma was the amount of airflow limitation, and less improvement in air flow following inhaled albuterol, a bronchodilator which relaxes the muscle tone in the airways.  The most important result of the paper was that at entry into the SARP Study, children with severe asthma had relatively more allergy-related inflammation but normal lung function, whereas adults with severe asthma had more complex patterns of inflammation with reduced lung function.  
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