Breastfeeding can protect infants from asthma

04 September, New Delhi

Infants genetically predisposed to asthma risk could be protected against respiratory symptoms of the disease if they are breastfed, according to a new a study presented at the European Respiratory Society’s International Congress.

“Our study is the first to show that breastfeeding can modify the effect of asthma-related genetic profiles on respiratory symptoms in the first year of life,” maintains Dr Olga Gorlanova, from the University Children’s Hospital Basel (UKBB), and the University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.

Genes that are associated with asthma risk are located on chromosome 17 and called 17q21. A recent study reported that children who possessed genetic variants on chromosome 17q21 had an increased risk of developing wheeze, when combined with certain environmental exposures. It is already known that environmental factors have a modifying effect on specific genetic risk, so the aim of this new study was to find out whether this could also be true for breastfeeding and this specific gene related to asthma with the respect to respiratory symptoms in early infancy.

As many as 368 infants from the Basel-Bern Infant Lung Development birth cohort in Switzerland were included in the study. Researchers collected data on occurrence and severity of respiratory symptoms, breastfeeding status and genotyping was performed. The findings revealed that during the weeks that infants were breastfed, those carrying the asthma risk genotypes, had a 27 per cent decreased relative risk of developing respiratory symptoms. When infants were not breastfed, those carriers exhibited a trend towards an increased risk of respiratory symptoms.

“As research in this field progresses, we are understanding more and more about the gene-environment interaction for the development of asthma (and) our study sheds light on how this interaction can be modified by breastfeeding, Dr Gorlanova said. “This is the first time that we were able to show the effect of the 17q21 variants on respiratory symptoms during the 1st year of life, depending on breastfeeding status.”