Background: Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) refers to a group of auto-immune conditions involving joint inflammation that first appears before the age of 16. In the United States, about 294,000 children are affected. Although JIA can be widely attributed to genetic factors, the consensus is that environmental factors also play a role. Attempts to assess the role of environmental factors, though scarce, have focused on the role of infections, smoking exposure, and breastfeeding. Hygiene hypothesis, which suggests that adaptive immunological response improves with higher frequencies of pathogen exposure in early childhood, has been used to try to explain the risk of JIA. Common markers of microbe exposure in early life include sibling number, pet number, and maternal parity. Some prior studies conducted outside the U.S. suggests that increasing sibling number is protective against the risk of JIA. This study aimed to evaluate prior findings, using data from the U.S. Methods: The study used data from the 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Survey for Child Health. The survey used a sample size of 21599 children to estimate the number of children in the U.S. Descriptive statistics was carried out, and logistic regression was used to determine the association between family number and the odds of developing JIA, while adjusting for sociodemographic variables. Family number was used as a proxy for sibling number. SAS v 9.4 was used for analysis. Results: Complete data on all the variables of interest were available for 17618 children, of which 67 had JIA. Although there was a marginal association between sibling number and JIA in the unadjusted model (OR [95% CI] 0.983-1.602) (P=0.068), in the adjusted model, there was no significant association between JIA and sibling number ([OR 95% CI] 0.8985-1.447) (P=0.29). There was a significant association between JIA and age, low birth weight, highest education level in the family, while sex had a marginal association. Conclusion: There was no association between family size and the development of JIA in this study. While some prior results have supported the observed significant effect of low birth weight, the disparity in results between this study and the Australian study could be due to the use of family number instead of sibling number. Further studies should assess the association of sibling number and developing JIA in the U.S.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:asrf-1465 |
Date | 12 April 2019 |
Creators | Uyamasi, Kido, Wang, Kesheng, Johnson, Kiana R. |
Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
Detected Language | English |
Type | text |
Format | application/pdf |
Source | Appalachian Student Research Forum |
Rights | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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