rs1042713
The airway receptor that asthma inhalers act on
What this position does
Beta-2 receptors relax the smooth muscle around your airways. They are what a blue reliever inhaler targets. This variant changes how the receptor behaves after repeated stimulation, which is why it has been studied for asthma treatment response.
Lungs. Shaped by opening the airways under stress. This is one of the variants that differs sharply between human populations, because something in the environment made one version worth having.
Pressures with no evolutionary history
Tobacco is about four hundred years old outside the Americas, and the attention economy is about fifteen. Nothing in your DNA is an adaptation to either. These variants are ancient machinery being pulled by something new.
What changed: Industry, roughly the last two centuries. Indoor work, heated buildings, refined food, cheap salt and sugar, tobacco at scale, and a collapse in infectious disease. This is where most of the deals in your genome came undone.
Why it spread: nobody knows. The frequency difference between populations is real and measured. What the variant was worth having for is not known, and any site that tells you is guessing.
Spiral Staircase, chapter 10: The Breath You Forgot How to Take Spiral Staircase is written by the same author as this site.
What each result means
| If you carry | What it means |
|---|---|
| No copies of the effect version GG | You have the arginine version on both copies The form that some studies associate with a poorer response to regular short-acting inhaler use. |
| One copy AG | You carry one of each The most common genotype. |
| Two copies AA | You have the glycine version on both copies The form that downregulates more readily in the laboratory. Real-world trials have not found a difference large enough to change prescribing, so nobody should change an inhaler over this. |
Worth knowing. Never change asthma treatment on a genetic result. Asthma control is measured by how you are breathing.
How common each version is
| Ancestry group | A (the effect version) | |
|---|---|---|
| African | 52.0% | |
| American | 45.7% | |
| East Asian | 54.9% | |
| European | 38.6% | |
| South Asian | 44.6% |
1000 Genomes Project phase 3, via Ensembl, retrieved 2026-09-23. These groupings are coarse and flatten a great deal of internal diversity, particularly within Africa. A variant being common somewhere tells you where a piece of your ancestry probably comes from, and nothing else.
How many people carry each result
| Ancestry group | GG | AG | AA |
|---|---|---|---|
| African | 161 / 661 | 312 / 661 | 188 / 661 |
| European | 183 / 503 | 252 / 503 | 68 / 503 |
| East Asian | 96 / 504 | 263 / 504 | 145 / 504 |
| South Asian | 163 / 489 | 216 / 489 | 110 / 489 |
| American | 101 / 347 | 175 / 347 | 71 / 347 |
Counts of people, not modelled frequencies: every one of the 2,504 individuals sequenced by the 1000 Genomes Project phase 3, tallied by the genotype they carry. Deriving these from allele frequencies instead would assume random mating inside each group and undercount the homozygotes.
How to find out which you have
If you have taken a test with 23andMe, AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, Family Tree DNA, TellMeGen or Living DNA, this position is very likely already in the raw data file they gave you. You do not need another test.
One thing to watch if you look it up by hand: testing companies report some positions from one DNA strand and some from the other, and the file does not say which. Read the letters as they appear and you will get the opposite of the truth for some positions. Sequencings resolves that automatically.
Source
Israel et al., Use of regularly scheduled albuterol treatment in asthma, The Lancet (2004)
Coordinates and allele pair verified against Ensembl GRCh37. Direction of effect verified against VEP protein consequences or 1000 Genomes population frequency. Category: Population adaptation.
Where this fits
Common questions
What is rs1042713?
rs1042713 is a position in the ADRB2 gene on chromosome 5. Beta-2 receptors relax the smooth muscle around your airways. They are what a blue reliever inhaler targets. This variant changes how the receptor behaves after repeated stimulation, which is why it has been studied for asthma treatment response.
What does it mean if I have AA at rs1042713?
You have the glycine version on both copies. The form that downregulates more readily in the laboratory. Real-world trials have not found a difference large enough to change prescribing, so nobody should change an inhaler over this.
What does it mean if I have GG at rs1042713?
You have the arginine version on both copies. The form that some studies associate with a poorer response to regular short-acting inhaler use.
How do I find out my rs1042713 genotype?
If you have taken a home DNA test, this position is very likely in the raw data file you were given. Sequencings reads that file in your browser without uploading it, and resolves which DNA strand each position was reported from, which is the step most manual lookups get wrong.
This is reference information, not medical advice, and not a diagnosis. See the medical disclaimer. Category: Population adaptation.