March 25th, 2015 | The EPA Asthma Team
DA new study challenges the widely held belief that inner-city children have a higher risk of asthma simply because of where they live. Race, ethnicity and income have much stronger effects on asthma risk than where children live, the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center researchers reported. The investigators looked at more than 23,000 children, aged 6 to 17, across the United States and found that asthma rates were 13 percent among inner-city children and 11 percent among those in suburban or rural areas. But that small difference vanished once other variables were factored in, according to the study published online Jan. 20 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Poverty increased the risk of asthma, as did being from certain racial/ethnic groups. Asthma rates were 20 percent for Puerto Ricans, 17 percent for blacks, 10 percent for whites, 9 percent for other Hispanics, and 8 percent for Asians, the study found. [...]