City Life May Not Be a Key Risk for Asthma

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City Life May Not Be a Key Risk for Asthma

The simple fact of growing up in a big city may not be a major factor in whether a child develops asthma, according to a new study that contradicts decades of public health assumptions about the so-called inner city asthma epidemic.

Instead, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that being poor, black or Puerto Rican are the most important factors that determine a child’s asthma risk.

Asthma affects 6.8 million children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Our results highlight the changing face of pediatric asthma and suggest that living in an urban area is, by itself, not a risk factor for asthma,” said Dr. Corinne Keet, a pediatric allergy and asthma specialist at Johns Hopkins, whose study was published on Tuesday in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Instead, they found Black or Puerto Rican children had far higher asthma rates, at 17 and 20 percent, respectively, compared with white children (10 percent), other Hispanic children (9 percent) and Asian children (8 percent).

Although the study did not look at why, the researchers did note that other studies suggest potential genetic and biologic causes for these racial and ethnic differences.

The team also saw wide variation by geography, with 17 percent of children living in Northeastern cities having asthma, compared with 8 percent in cities located in western states.

Asthma was not confined to cities. For example, asthma rates were 21 percent in poor suburban areas of the Northeast, compared with 17 percent in neighboring cities.

The study did not look at factors that influence the severity of asthma, which could very well be more prevalent in cities, the authors said. That will be a subject of a follow-on study.

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