Bed-sharing and childhood asthma: from associations to causal modelling

Bed-sharing and childhood asthma: from associations to causal modelling.

One can hypothesise diverse influences of bed-sharing practices on respiratory disease. First, the close contact between bed-sharing parents and their offspring could lead to increased transmission of infectious agents and, thus, more virus-induced wheeze in the children. Conversely, the hygiene hypothesis suggests that contact with common pathogens in early childhood might protect from later a...

Is parent-child bed-sharing a risk for wheezing and asthma in early childhood?

Household crowding can place young children at risk for respiratory infections which subsequently provoke asthma symptoms. However, crowding might also protect against asthma, in accordance with the hygiene hypothesis. We tested if parent-infant bed-sharing, an important dimension of household crowding, increases or decreases the risk for asthma. In a population-based prospective cohort (N = 61...

From Childhood Aggression to Delinquency: Causal Pathways

Childhood pneumonia and crowding, bed-sharing and nutrition: a case-control study from The Gambia

SETTING Greater Banjul and Upper River Regions, The Gambia. OBJECTIVE To investigate tractable social, environmental and nutritional risk factors for childhood pneumonia. DESIGN A case-control study examining the association of crowding, household air pollution (HAP) and nutritional factors with pneumonia was undertaken in children aged 2-59 months: 458 children with severe pneumonia, defin...

ADAM33 polymorphisms and phenotype associations in childhood asthma.

BACKGROUND A disintegrin and metalloproteinase (ADAM) 33 has been implicated as an asthma susceptibility gene by using a positional cloning approach. However, genetic linkage of asthma phenotypes to chromosome 20p13 (the location of ADAM33) has not been observed in most asthma genome scans, and it is unclear whether these associations with ADAM33 are broadly generalizable. OBJECTIVE To examin...