Asthma and Allergy
Asthma and allergy commonly run in families: asthma, eczema and hay fever often hunt as a pack. These are conditions mediated by an increase in the secretion of chemicals involved in mediating our inflammatory response, so that instead of being protective they’re destructive, because there’s too much of them. Many such families secrete too much of an antibody called IgE which sensitises the mast cells that contain the inflammatory mediators. Such families are described as atopic, and their ability to produce excessive amounts of IgE has been shown to be due to defects in a number of different chromosomes.
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