Updates and News
American Asthma Foundation Announces Breakthrough Discovery
Common House Dust Mites Trigger Asthma Attacks by Tricking the Immune System
San Francisco, California, January 6, 2009: The American Asthma Foundation announced a research breakthrough that explains why tiny, household pests called dust mites are a major source of airborne allergens for patients with allergic asthma.
Seth Feldman, Executive Director of the American Asthma Foundation, explains “that although dust mites are known to trigger asthma attacks, until now we did not know why the allergic response to the mites was so strong.” The mystery was solved as a result of research funded by the American Asthma Foundation’s
Research Program. The results were published December 7, 2008 on www.nature.com, the on-line edition of Nature, a prestigious scientific journal. The lead investigator, Dr. Christopher Karp, and his colleagues found that house dust mites trick the immune system into believing that it is facing a bacterial infection. Thus misinformed, the immune system
mounts a strong allergic response to the mites, a response that can trigger asthma attacks.
Dr. Karp is head of the Division of Molecular Immunology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. In 2006, he received a three-year senior investigator award from the American Asthma Foundation’s Research Program. The Program sponsors research that investigates new theories
about the underlying causes of asthma with the goal of improving treatment and curing and preventing the disease. Dr. Karp’s colleagues included researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the
Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa, and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, Iowa.
Asthma is a chronic, complex disease that is a major public health problem. Nearly one in every 13 people in the United States has asthma — more Americans than have coronary heart disease or cancer or Parkinson’s Disease. Asthma is the most serious chronic disease of childhood and disproportionately strikes the poor.
