MADRID – A parental history of asthma or allergic rhinitis significantly increases the risk that a child will develop atopic dermatitis, and that risk doubles if a parent has a history of atopic dermatitis rather than another atopic disease, Nina H. Ravn reported at a meeting of the European Task Force on Atopic Dermatitis held in conjunction with the annual congress of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology.
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Nina H. Ravn
She presented a comprehensive meta-analysis of 149 published studies addressing the risk of developing atopic dermatitis according to parental history of atopic disease. The studies included more than 656,000 participants. The picture that emerged from the meta-analysis was one of a stepwise increase in the risk of pediatric atopic dermatitis according to the type and number of parental atopic diseases present.
“This is something that hopefully can be useful when you talk with parents or parents-to-be with atopic diseases and they want to know how their disease might affect their child,” explained Ms. Ravn of the University of Copenhagen.
It’s also information that clinicians will find helpful in appropriately targeting primary prevention interventions if and when methods of proven efficacy become available. That’s a likely prospect, as this is now an extremely active field of research, she noted.