Asthma and lower airway diseaseAsthma-associated differences in microbial composition of induced sputum
Section snippets
Subjects and sputum samples
Induced sputum samples from 10 patients with physician-diagnosed active asthma and 10 nonasthmatic adults were obtained for this study. The samples were collected as part of the ongoing Tucson Children's Respiratory Study, a nonselected birth cohort whose participants are now adults in their early 30s.13 Asthma, wheeze, bronchitis, and smoking information was collected from participant-completed questionnaires at age 26 years. Spirometry was completed according to American Thoracic Society
Results
Characteristics of the study subjects are presented in Table I.15 All subjects were part of a longitudinal study of the natural history of asthma in a nonselected birth cohort,13 and therefore the previous history of asthma could be confirmed from available data. Inhaled medication use for asthma or wheeze during the past year is described in Table II. None of the participants reported using oral medications for asthma during the past year. The majority of the asthmatic patients had a
Discussion
In this study, for the first time, we used the high-throughput 454 sequencing technology to obtain estimates of bacterial diversity in induced sputum. We demonstrate that, as was observed in 2 previous studies using invasive techniques to obtain airway samples, differences in bacterial community composition are associated with active asthma and Proteobacteria were more abundant in induced sputum of asthmatic than nonasthmatic subjects.
We found that samples from asthmatic patients have greater
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Cited by (0)
Supported by Southwest Environmental Health Sciences (SWEHSC) training grant ES007901 (to P.R.M.). Part of this study was supported by National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grants HL 56177 and HL 14136 (to F.D.M. and A.L.W.) and SWEHSC grant ES006694 (to D.B.).
Disclosure of potential conflict of interest: D. A. Stern has been supported by one or more grants from and/or has one or more grants pending with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A. L. Wright has been supported by one or more grants from and/or has one or more grants pending with NIH, has received one or more payments for lecturing from or is on the speakers' bureau for the Association of American Medical Colleges and the University of Vermont, and has received one or more payments for the development of educational presentations for Association of American Medical Colleges. F. D. Martinez has been supported by one or more grants from CRS (HL56177), has consultancy arrangements with MedImmune, has received one or more grants from or has one or more grants pending with the NIH, has received one or more payments for lecturing from or is on the speakers' bureau for Abbott and Merck, and has received one or more payments for travel/accommodations/meeting expenses from Abbott and Merck. The rest of the authors declare that they have no relevant conflicts of interest.