Children twice as likely to suffer allergy if parent of same sex has it
Allergies such as asthma and eczema have long been known to be heredity but new research from the immunology department at Southampton General Hospital has gone one step further and discovered the inheritance is twice as likely to be passed between mother and daughter, father and son.
Professor Hasran Arshad and his team assessed 1,456 patients and found the risk of asthma in boys only increased if their fathers suffered from it, while mothers with asthma doubled the chances of their daughters suffering, but not their sons, reports the Independent.
The research also shows that maternal eczema is twice as likely to be passed on to daughters, with the same level of risk between fathers and sons.
Professor Arshad described the findings as “groundbreaking” since it would change the way they assessed a child’s risk of disease and could open the way to finding ways of preventing sex-specific disease.
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