Background: Epidemiological evidence indicates that atopic asthma correlates with high serum IgE levels though the
contribution of allergen specific IgE to the pathogenesis and the severity of the disease is still unclear.
Methods: We developed a microarray immunoassay containing 103 allergens to study the IgE reactivity profiles of 485
asthmatic and 342 non-asthmatic individuals belonging to families whose members have a documented history of asthma
and atopy. We employed k-means clustering, to investigate whether a particular IgE reactivity profile correlated with asthma
and other atopic conditions such as rhinitis, conjunctivitis and eczema.
Results: Both case-control and parent-to-siblings analyses demonstrated that while the presence of specific IgE against
individual allergens correlated poorly with pathological conditions, particular reactivity profiles were significantly associated
with asthma (p,10E-09). An artificial neural network (ANN)-based algorithm, calibrated with the profile reactivity data,
correctly classified as asthmatic or non-asthmatic 78% of the individual examined. Multivariate statistical analysis
demonstrated that the familiar relationships of the study population did not affect the observed correlations.
Conclusions: These findings indicate that asthma is a higher-order phenomenon related to patterns of IgE reactivity rather
than to single antibody reactions. This notion sheds new light on the pathogenesis of the disease and can be readily
employed to distinguish asthmatic and non-asthmatic individuals on the basis of their serum reactivity profile.