Review

Association studies for asthma and atopic diseases: a comprehensive review of the literature

Sabine Hoffjan¹ , Dan Nicolae² and Carole Ober¹

¹  Departments of Human Genetics, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

²  Departments of Statistics, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

author email corresponding author email

Respiratory Research 2003, 4:14doi:10.1186/1465-9921-4-14

Published:	4 December 2003

Abstract

Hundreds of genetic association studies on asthma-related phenotypes have been conducted in different populations. To date, variants in 64 genes have been reported to be associated with asthma or related traits in at least one study. Of these, 33 associations were replicated in a second study, 9 associations were not replicated either in a second study or a second sample in the same study, and 22 associations were reported in just a single published study. These results suggest the potential for a great amount of heterogeneity underlying asthma. However, many of these studies are methodologically limited and their interpretation hampered by small sample sizes.