А bootstrap analysis of immune status in preschool children suffering from recurrent respiratory infections

Abstract

Purpose - to carry out a systematic analysis of humoral and blood cellular immunity parameters in preschool children with a different frequency of acute respiratory infection (ARI) during the previous year using bootstrap analysis. Materials and methods. Twenty-six children (11 boys and 15 girls) aged 1 to 4 years old, undergoing inpatient treatment on ARI, were involved in the clinical study. Serum concentrations of immunoglobulins (Ig) of classes A, M, G, E and a number of blood cellular immunity parameters were studied. Also, two indicators of ARI recurrence were calculated, namely, the infectious index and the resistance index. The statistical processing of the primary digital material obtained was performed by IBM SPSS Statistics 28 licensed program. Results. A direct moderate bootstrap correlation between the resistance index and serum IgA concentration in the preschool children with the different frequency of ARI according to their anamnesis (Bρ=0.407; p<0.001 [0.397-0.418]) was established. A rank correlation analysis, a multiple linear and an ordinal logistic regression combined with bootstrapping showed no significant relationship between particular serum Ig, on the one hand, and particular blood cellular immunity parameters, on the other hand. A partial bootstrap correlation analysis revealed the significant influence of many covariates studied on the strength of relationship between the indicators in the selected pair combinations. Conclusions. Provided the initial quantitative limitation of the observation group of the preschool children suffering from recurrent respiratory infections, the bootstrapping procedure applied significantly expands the interpretive possibilities of the clinical and immunological study results. Besides the standard estimation of the asymptotic significance of partial correlation coefficients, the bootstrap definition of their 95% confidence interval is an additional and highly informative way to check the results’ statistical validity. The study was conducted in accordance with the principles of the Helsinki Declaration. The study protocol was approved by the local ethics committees of the institutions mentioned in the paper. An informed parental consent was obtained for the study in children. No conflict of interests was declared by the authors.