Childhood Viral Infections and Allergy Risk in a 20-Year Cohort

142 individuals from a pre-birth cohort of 281 were tracked for 20 years to study links between early viral exposure and adult allergy. Parent-reported respiratory infections and seropositivity against 13 viruses at age two were analyzed alongside hereditary risk groups. Individuals with 11-20 early respiratory infections had a 58% allergy prevalence, compared to 34% for those with fewer than 10.

Use Cases

• Modeling allergy risk based on early respiratory infection frequency and cytomegalovirus seropositivity.
• Analyzing interaction effects between viral exposure and hereditary allergy predisposition.
• Validating parent-reported infection data against serological biomarkers from clinical investigations.

Strengths

• Longitudinal design with 20-year follow-up from a pre-birth cohort of 281 individuals.
• Combines parent-reported infection data with serological testing for 13 specific viruses.
• Uses multiple analysis methods, including logistic regression and classification tree modeling.

Limitations

• Sample size reduced to 142 for complete questionnaire and clinical data at follow-up.
• Column names and specific variable definitions are not provided in the metadata.
• The dataset appears to be supplementary material (DOCX), which may limit direct computational analysis.

Provenance

Source

figshare admin karger

Collection Method

Cohort study with web-based questionnaires and clinical investigations.

Time Range

From pre-birth to 20 years of age.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-19.

Geography

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