Gender Impacts Asthma Severity

Ivanhoe Newswire

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Girls and boys deal with asthma differently.

A new report from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School shows even though boys are more likely to have childhood asthma than girls, they are also more likely to outgrow it in adolescence and have fewer incidents after puberty.

Researchers analyzed airway responsiveness (AR) in 1,041 children age's five to 12 with mild to moderate asthma over a period of about nine years.

When it came to the amount of methacholine it took to constrict the airways, results show not much changed in girls. But boys became more tolerant over time to larger and larger doses of methacholine. This suggests a possible decrease in the severity of asthma. By the time participants were 16, it took more than twice as much methacholine to get a 20 percent constriction in the boys' airways on average as it did with the girls.

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The study also found by age 18, only 14 percent of the girls did not show any significant degree of airways responsiveness, compared to 27 percent of boys.

"While our results were not unexpected, they do point to intriguing potential mechanisms, to explain the gender differences in asthma incidence and severity," lead researcher, Kelan G. Tantisira, M.D., M.P.H., Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was quoted as saying. "Especially intriguing is that the differences in gender begin at the time of transition into early puberty."

Researchers are now following these children over time to see what happens with AR and the severity of asthma in adulthood.

SOURCE: American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 2008;178:325-331

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