Relationship of maternal skin test responses to infant cord-blood progenitor cytokine receptor expression

Increasingly, focus has turned toward the perinatal period as critical for development of atopy and atopic disease. Based on previous findings of impaired cord blood T helper-cell (Lancet 1999;353:196) and CD34+ progenitor maturational responses (J Allergy Clin Immunol 1999;104:370) in atopic at-risk infants, we examined the relationship between maternal atopy, as measured by the number of positive skin prick tests (SPT), and cytokine receptor expression on CD34+ cord blood progenitors. Patients from two separate cohorts were examined – the Allergy Prevention Program cohort from Australia and a small, ongoing birth cohort from Hamilton, Ontario. CD34+/CD45+ cord blood mononuclear cells were analyzed using flow cytometry for IL-3, IL-5 and GM-CSF receptor expression. Maternal SPT were performed to standard allergen extracts. Data available on 64 subjects (6 from Hamilton, 58 from Australia) revealed a significant inverse relationship between GM-CSFRα and IL-5Rα and the number of positive maternal SPT in both cohorts: Hamilton cohort r=−0.857 ( P=0.029); Australian cohort r=−0.293 ( P=0.026). In the Hamilton cohort, a positive correlation was found between IL-3Rα and positive maternal SPT r=0.848 ( P=0.033). Infant cord blood progenitor IL-5Rα and GM-CSFRα are negatively associated with the number of maternal SPT, while IL-3Rα is positively associated with SPT. These findings are consistent with the concept of a relative immaturity of hemopoietic progenitors in the cord blood of infants at risk of developing atopy, and point out the potential predictive capacity of cord blood progenitors for atopic disease