as variables independently associated with asthma phenotypic characteristics. Notably, LASSO regression selected circulating IL-6 as the most prominent predictive biomarker for asthma phenotypic characteristics among all evaluated clinical, inflammatory and lung function variables. A predictive nomogram incorporating key variables showed excellent discriminative performance in the training cohort (C-index = 0.85, 95% CI: 0.79-0.91) and was validated in an independent cohort (C-index = 0.82, 95% CI: 0.75-0.89).ConclusionElevated circulating IL-6 is a prominent feature associated with a distinct phenotypic subgroup of pediatric asthma, and is correlated with impaired lung function and increased airway inflammation in asthmatic children. These findings support the potential of IL-6 as a significant predictive biomarker for phenotypic risk stratification in pediatric asthma, and suggest its potential utility in phenotypic subtyping of asthmatic patients and as a promising therapeutic target for the IL-6-high pediatric asthma subgroup. All conclusions are interpreted cautiously given the study's methodological limitations, and further large-cohort prospective validation is required.
Liu et al. (2026) studied this question.