Genetic risk assessments could eventually also be used to predict which children with asthma were likely to grow out of the condition, and which would continue having symptoms as they grew older, the research suggested.
The study's lead author is Dr Daniel Belsky, of the Duke University Medical Centre, in North Carolina, in the United States, and one of the Otago authors is Associate Prof Bob Hancox, a respiratory physician in the Otago preventive and social medicine department.
Prof Hancox said the results were ''interesting'' from a scientific viewpoint but, like all good research, also raised many questions.
''There's a lot more to find out.''
It was ''early days'', a great deal more research had to be done, and it was much too early to apply the research to the clinical management of individual patients.
The research again high-lighted the international importance of the long-running Dunedin multidisciplinary study of about 1000 children born in 1972-73, he said.
A team of Otago and Duke University researchers set out to test how genetic discoveries concerning asthma predisposition related to the developmental and biological characteristics of the condition. Their findings were published last month in the online edition of the United Kingdom journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
After analysing data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Study, the team discovered that people both with childhood asthma and higher genetic risk scores for being predisposed to it were more than one-third (36%) more likely to develop lifelong asthma than those found to have a lower genetic risk.
Participants with asthma and a higher genetic risk were also more likely to develop atopic (allergic) asthma and impaired lung function (airway hyper-responsiveness and incompletely reversible airflow obstruction), and to miss school or work and to be hospitalised because of asthma.
About half of all children with asthma will grow out of it by the time they reach adolescence or adulthood. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified several genetic variants - single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs - which individually carried a small increased risk of asthma.
The researchers developed a genetic risk score based on 15 GWAS-identified variants and then tested associations between the scores and physical manifestations of asthma in 880 study members.
The research showed boys and girls with higher risk scores were more likely to develop asthma over the 38 years of follow-up than people with lower scores, and also developed asthma earlier in life.
