Discover the Science of Health
A bacterial protein in common house dust may worsen allergic responses to indoor allergens, according to research conducted by the National Institutes of Health and Duke University. The finding is the first to document the presence of the protein flagellin in house dust, bolstering the link between allergic asthma and the environment.
Giving children and adolescents with egg allergy small but increasing daily doses of egg white powder holds the possibility of developing into a way to enable some of them to eat egg-containing foods without having allergic reactions, according to a study supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The study results will appear online in the July 19th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine [1].
World Asthma Day (WAD) takes place each year on the first Tuesday in May. The annual event, organized by the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA), raises asthma awareness and care around the world. Continuing last year’s positive theme, the WAD 2012 theme is “You Can Control Your Asthma”. The campaign emphasizes asthma control as described in the latest version of the GINA guideline documents [1]. Asthma control is also the focus of GINA’s Asthma Control Challenge, a five-year campaign to reduce asthma hospitalizations worldwide by fifty percent.
The emerging field of epigenetics has added a new dimension to the “nature versus nurture” debate, by which researchers have historically attempted to determine whether a characteristic was influenced by genes or environment. Increasingly, it appears that environmental influences can affect gene expression, meaning that “nature” and “nurture” are inextricable from one another to an even greater extent than previously understood.
Image credit: DNA structure via ShutterstockJust as clothing styles come in and out of fashion, diagnoses go through fads as well. While this is rarely true of diagnoses issued by traditional healthcare practitioners, health-related Internet sites (particularly those promoting alternative medicine) and some practitioners of alternative medicine may be susceptible to these diagnostic trends. One such fad diagnosis is lactose intolerance, which is sometimes blamed for everything from hyperactivity to joint pain.
Image credit: Pouring milk splash via Shutterstock
