Córdoba is one of the Spanish cities with the highest records of plane tree pollen grains in the air. Clinical studies have identified Platanus as a major cause of pollinosis. This fact provokes an important public health problem during early spring when these trees bloom. The objective of the study is to evaluate the correlation between airborne pollen counts and Pla a 1 aeroallergen concentra...

IgE-mediated allergies today affect up to 30 % of the population in industrialized countries. Allergen immunotherapy is the only disease-modifying treatment option with a long-term effect. However, very few patients (<5 %) choose immunotherapy, due to the long treatment duration (between 3-5 years) and possible local and systemic allergic side effects of the allergen administrations. The latter...

Environmental allergen exposure plays an important role in the development and expression of asthma and allergy. To study allergen exposure, it is necessary to actually measure allergen levels. Direct measurement is also needed to assess what levels lead to sensitisation or provoke symptoms in already sensitised subjects, and evaluate the efficacy of allergy reduction strategies (1). The measur...

In this investigation we have used a mouse model containing certain phenotypic characteristics consistent with asthma and IL-4- and CD40-deficient mice to establish the role of this cytokine and allergen-specific immunoglobulins in the initiation of airways hyperreactivity and morphological changes to the airways in responses to aeroallergen challenge. Sensitization and aerosol challenge of mic...

BACKGROUND Although evidence suggests that ambient exposures to endotoxin and other immunostimulants during early life influence allergic risk, efforts to understand this host-environment relationship have been hampered by a paucity of relevant assays. OBJECTIVES These investigations determined whether parameters of house dust extract (HDE) bioactivity were predictive of allergen skin prick t...

Aeroallergen provocation induces the rapid accumulation of CD11c(+)MHC class II (MHC II)(+) dendritic cells (DCs) in the lungs, which is driven by an increased recruitment of blood-derived DC precursors. Recent data show, however, that well-differentiated DCs proliferate in situ in various tissues. This may also contribute to their allergen-induced expansion; therefore, we studied DC proliferat...