Asthma affects children regardless of where they live and whether they are rich or poor. But scientists have long thought that living in poor urban neighborhoods adds an extra risk for this troublesome lung inflammation. A new study suggests that's not necessarily the case.
Asthma is often triggered by something in the environment, so in the 1960s, scientists started looking for places where asthma was especially bad.
"Researchers started noting that people living in inner cities like New York, Chicago and Baltimore, had rates of asthma in general and they seemed to have very high rates of hospitalization and emergency room visits," says Dr. Corrine Keet, a pediatric allergist at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.
Keet and her colleagues realized that nobody had ever taken a sweeping look to see if what was true in those cities applied nationwide. So they did that study to check those assumptions. Their surprising findings appear in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
[For more of this story, written by Richard Harris, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...or-high-asthma-rates]
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