Language and Cognitive Performance in Children with Well-Controlled Asthma: Associations with Serum pNF-H and Neurogranin

Background/Objectives: Childhood asthma is increasingly viewed as a systemic condition that may also affect neurodevelopmental processes. We examined language and cognitive performance and their associations with serum biomarkers of neuroinflammation, neuroaxonal integrity and synaptic function in school-aged children with clinically well-controlled asthma.

Methods

In this cross-sectional study, 67 children (33 with asthma and 34 healthy controls) underwent the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Revised (WISC-R), the Turkish Nonword Repetition Test (TAST), the Turkish School-Age Language Development Test (TODİL), sleep and psychosocial scales, and audiometric screening. Serum interleukin-4 (IL-4), IL-13, C-X-C motif chemokine ligand 13 (CXCL13), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), nerve growth factor (NGF), chitinase-3-like protein-1 (YKL-40/CHI3L1), triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2), monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), synaptosomal-associated protein 25 (SNAP-25), neurogranin, and phosphorylated neurofilament heavy chain (pNF-H) were measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Groups were compared with Mann–Whitney U and chi-square/Fisher tests and with age- and sex-adjusted regression using HC3 robust standard errors, with Benjamini–Hochberg (BH) false-discovery-rate (FDR) correction within predefined outcome families; within the asthma group, biomarkers were related to language and cognitive outcomes in exploratory multiple regression.