Image credit: Kat Jayne (CC0)
Asthma causes wheezy and troubled breathing, and can be life-threatening. Scientists and doctors understand that asthma begins in early childhood. Chest infections, exposure to bacteria, viruses, and allergies may cause or trigger asthma. One person with asthma may not have the same origins as another. But it is not yet clear how various triggers may interact to trigger or exacerbate asthma.
To disentangle how these factors contribute to asthma, experts have tried to group people with asthma into subgroups. Unfortunately, the groups often vary from expert to expert. Now, some scientists are using computers to sort patients with asthma. The scientists let the computers decide the best criteria for sorting patients. This way the machines may identify patterns that are not obvious to humans.
Using this computer-based approach, Tang et al. sorted Australian children with asthma into 3 groups based on their early life allergies and respiratory health. One group has high-risk asthma with frequent chest infections and strong allergic responses. The other two groups are low-risk, but they respond differently to allergy and infection. Common tests used by doctors to diagnose patients with allergy or asthma may not work the same with all three groups. The bacteria found in the nose influence the risk of asthma, even in patients who are well, and the way this occurs varies by group. Similar groups were also found among children with asthma in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Learning more about subgroups of patients with asthma may help other scientists and doctors design better ways to diagnose, treat, or prevent asthma. Working together with scientists around the world to determine how to best describe subgroups of people according to asthma type and risk is a critical step in the process. Tang et al. hope other scientist will test whether these three groups are also found in people from other parts of the world.
