Features of asthma which provide meaningful insights for understanding the disease heterogeneity

Abstract

Background

Data-driven methods such as hierarchical clustering (HC) and principal component analysis (PCA) have been used to identify asthma subtypes, with inconsistent results.

Objective

To develop a framework for the discovery of stable and clinically meaningful asthma subtypes.

Methods

We performed HC in a rich dataset from 613 asthmatic children, using 45 clinical variables (Model 1), and after PCA dimensionality reduction (Model 2). Clinical experts then identified a set of asthma features/domains which informed clusters in the two analyses. In Model 3, we re-clustered the data using these features to ascertain whether this improved the discovery process.

Results

Cluster stability was poor in Models 1 and 2. Clinical experts highlighted four asthma features/domains which differentiated the clusters in two models: age of onset, allergic sensitization, severity, and recent exacerbations. In Model 3 (HC using these four features), cluster stability improved substantially. The cluster assignment changed, providing more clinically interpretable results. In a 5-cluster model, we labelled the clusters as: "Difficult asthma" (n=132); "Early-onset mild atopic" (n=210); "Early-onset mild non-atopic: (n=153); "Late-onset" (n=105); and "Exacerbation-prone asthma" (n=13). Multinomial regression demonstrated that lung function was significantly diminished among children with "Difficult asthma"; blood eosinophilia was a significant feature of "Difficult", "Early-onset mild atopic", and "Late-onset asthma". Children with moderate-severe asthma were present in each cluster.

Conclusions and clinical relevance

An integrative approach of blending the data with clinical expert domain knowledge identified four features, which may be informative for ascertaining asthma endotypes. These findings suggests that variables which are key determinants of asthma presence, severity or control, may not be the most informative for determining asthma subtypes. Our results indicate that exacerbation-prone asthma may be a separate asthma endotype, and that severe asthma is not a single entity, but an extreme end of the spectrum of several different asthma endotypes.

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