Study Measuring Asthma Incidence

NIAID/NIH funds DENs using data at birth to compare through young adulthood.  

Dr. Hongmei Zhang, professor of Biostatistics and Division Director, just received an R21 award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The focus of the study is on epigenetic network clusters and their association with asthma incidence.

In the U.S., 8% adults and 7% children (~25 million) have asthma, and asthma is the leading chronic disease in children. Detecting markers associated with the asthma incidence have a strong potential for asthma prediction and prevention. Currently studies focus on individual contributions of CpGs on asthma development, which takes a high risk of concluding incomplete and/or misleading findings. Such limitations have been widely agreed upon, and methods to address joint activities among genes have been proposed, including approaches to identify differentially methylated regions and those for detection of gene networks, but no methods available that address heterogeneity while building networks and thus substantially circumscribing the ability of disease prediction and prevention, due to potential reverse-causation on gene activities.

Zhang and her team proposed a technique to detect distinct epigenetic networks (DENs) with each unique to a group of subjects via network clustering using epigenetic data (e.g., DNA methylation data; DNAm) before disease manifestation, e.g., at-birth DNAm and childhood asthma. They will evaluate the longitudinal association of DENs at birth with asthma incidence in children, post-adolescence, and young adulthood, assess the role of age, sex, and race in this association, and examine the benefit of evaluating joint rather than individual activities of CpGs on the risk of asthma incidence. At the University of Memphis, Dr. Yu (Joyce) Jiang, associate professor of Biostatistics, Dr. Xichen Mou, assistant professor of Biostatistics, and Dr. Bernie Daigle, associate professor of Biology, are co-investigators on this research project. Other collaborators are Dr. Hasan Arshad, professor in Allergy and Clinical Immunology, and Dr. John Holloway, professor in Allergy and Respiratory Genetics, at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

For more on this study and/or research, contact Zhang at hzhang6@memphis.edu.