Given their findings, researchers estimate that up to 50 percent of the United States population could be in jeopardy of experiencing health problems related to air pollution. The study is published in the Jan. 10 issue of the British journal The Lancet.
"This important study adds to previous data that suggest how modern environmental factors interact with the body's defenses to produce 'airway' diseases considered rare before the advent of industrialized society," says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of NIAID.
"The knowledge provided by this work will help us identify people who are susceptible to the deleterious effects of diesel emissions on the clinical course of asthma and hay fever," says Kenneth Adams, Ph.D., who oversees asthma research funded by NIAID. "It will also help accelerate development of drugs to treat and prevent these diseases."
This study also received support from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, another NIH component.
The authors of the study examined how a family of antioxidant-related genes--GSTM1, GSTT1 and GSTP1--reacts to diesel exhaust particles, a common air pollutant. The body generates antioxidants to detoxify harmful particles and limit the corresponding allergic reaction.
Researchers sampled the DNA of volunteers who are allergic to ragweed to find which forms of the genes they had. The participants were then given doses of ragweed through the nose, followed by either a placebo or quantities of diesel exhaust particles equivalent to breathing the air in Los Angeles, CA, for 40 hours.
The mix of ragweed and diesel exhaust triggered greater allergic responses than ragweed alone. Additionally, the diese
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Contact: Paul Williams
pwilliams@niaid.nih.gov
301-402-1663
NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
8-Jan-2004