An increasing number of children are afflicted by allergies and common signs, such as food sensitivity and eczema, often manifest during the first years of life. The biological mechanisms responsible for allergy development are still unclear but the intrauterine environment is of high importance. One explanation could be that reprogramming of epigenetic marks in fetal DNA (e.g. DNA methylation patterns) increases the risk of asthma and allergy.
The overall aim of this study is to build a predictive model for identification of children at high risk of asthma and allergy. Taking advantage of NorthPop – a recently started prospective birth cohort in Northern Sweden - this project will follow 726 mother-child pairs from pregnancy to 3 years of age. Samples and information from the mothers are collected during pregnancy and cord blood is collected from the newborns.
DNA methylation data has been previously obtained and, as part of the project, we recently added GWAS data (based on the Illumina Global Screening Array Multiple Disease (GSA-MD)). We are now requesting resources to allow us to impute SNPs (to increase the usability of the dataset) and calculate polygenic risk scores.