 Adequately treated asthma often has minimal impact of quality of life but diagnosis and proper treatment is often delayed, resulting in increased missed school days, emergency room visits, and otherwise preventable degradation in quality of life. It would therefore be highly useful to identify a biomarker that can be used to assist in the diagnosis of asthma or to identify subjects at higher risk of developing allergic disease or asthma in the future. Efforts at identifying a genetic marker for the early diagnosis of asthma have been unsuccessful, mainly due to the complexity of the pathogenesis of the disease. 