Children of mothers with AD prone to develop AD, other allergic illness

Children whose mothers have atopic dermatitis (AD) are likely to develop the same disease, while some develop other allergic illness (OAI) first, reports a study. This suggests that not everyone will follow the same sequential pathway.

“AD is thought to precede the onset of OAI in a temporal progression (ie, atopic march), yet the timing and progression has been questioned,” the authors said. “It is also unclear how parental allergic illness impacts the development of these illnesses in offspring.”

This study was conducted to explore the risk of incident AD and timing of allergic disease in children born to mothers with AD compared with those without AD from the UK. The authors formed a birth cohort of mother-child pairs using the IQVIA Medical Research Data database. They also used Cox proportional models to explore such associations.

A total of 1,224,243 child-mother pairs were enrolled, with mean child follow-up time of 10.8 years (50.1 percent males; n=600,905). Results showed that children born to mothers with AD were 59-percent more likely to have AD (hazard ratio, 1.59, 95 percent confidence interval, 1.57‒1.60) than those born to mothers without AD (mean age of first AD diagnosis 3.3 years).

The majority (91.0 percent) of children with any diagnosis of AD presented with AD first, but only 67.8 percent developed AD initially in those with asthma.

“The atopic march describes the temporal association of initial onset of AD at an early age followed by subsequent development of other atopic illness,” the authors said. “We observed that whereas this may be true for some, not all patients with allergic diseases including AD, will follow the same ‘sequential’ march.”