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Higher rate of asthma incidence observed in children living in urban areas

Children living in a metropolitan area had an increased risk for developing asthma during their preschool years, according to recent research.

“The majority of incident asthma occurred during preschool years,” Hind Sbihi, research associate and PhD candidate from the School of Population and Public Health at University of British Columbia, and colleagues wrote. “During this period, air pollution’s impact on asthma incidence was enhanced among low term birth weight children.”

Sbihi and colleagues followed from birth to age 10 years 65,254 children born in the Vancouver metropolitan area between 1999 and 2002, according to the abstract. Researchers analyzed the effect of perinatal air pollution by recording the number of asthma cases within the cohort as well as exposures to air pollutants using measurements such as proximity, land use regression and inverse-distance weighted methods.

They found 6,948 cases of asthma between ages 0 years and 5 years and 1,711 asthma cases between ages 6 years and 10 years, according to the abstract. Using the inverse-distance weighted method, Sbihi and colleagues found the risk for asthma increased with the addition of molecular compounds such as nitric oxide (adjusted OR = 1.06; 95% CI, 1.01-1.11), nitrogen dioxide (adjusted OR = 1.09; 95% CI, 1.04-1.13) and carbon monoxide (adjusted OR = 1.05; 95% CI, 1.01 – 1.1) after adjusting for factors such as maternal age and education, household income, birthweight, parity, gestational age and breastfeeding at discharge. The researchers noted children born at a low birth weight saw an enhanced asthma impact from air pollution compared with other children, and that these associations remained even when there were green residential surrounding areas. – by Jeff Craven

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