We now know that children who have asthma and are also obese are more likely to require an urgent visit to the doctor for breathing problems than those who are not obese. Obese children are thought to have a different type of asthma, which is more severe and harder to control. This may be because the current treatments we use to manage daily symptoms do not work very well for this type of asthma. There are many theories that could explain why this is happening. One possible reason could be that the child’s genetic makeup may also play a role in the development of obesity as well as influence their response to treatment.

To address this problem, my proposed project aims to investigate how obesity can affect the response to treatment in children with asthma. In the first phase, I will examine whether obese children with asthma are less likely to respond to standard treatments than those who have normal weight using cutting-edge statistical methods. In the second phase, I will investigate whether certain genetic changes influence the children’s ability to respond to asthma treatments and if these same changes are also affected by excess weight.

To do this, I will analyze data that has already been collected from a large number of children with asthma in many different countries, including ALSPAC. The data that will be used for this project forms part of an international collaboration in pediatric asthma, called the Pharmacogenomics in Childhood Asthma (PiCA) Consortium. PiCA is the largest pediatric asthma consortium in the world and has all the necessary data to successfully carry out this research.

I expect the results of this project to help doctors and scientists understand why obese children with asthma are suffering with more severe symptoms than others. Identifying the reasons why they are severe will promote the development of new targeted treatments for children with asthma who have excess weight, with the ultimate goal of improving the management and quality of life for these children.