Why Are More People Getting Asthma?
- Friday, July 24, 2009, 23:58
- Asthma
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- Gina:
- Is it true that we’re seeing an increase in asthma, and why would that be?
- Dr. Redding:
- It’s very clear that asthma prevalence, that is, the commonness of asthma, is increasing over time and has done so for the last two decades. There are lots of smart people trying to determine why that’s the case. It appears right now that the most common asthma occurs in developed countries, primarily in Britain and Australia and New Zealand. The United States is somewhere behind those those countries but much ahead of underdeveloped countries. So, the question is, what is it about the western lifestyle that promotes the prevalence of asthma, and more importantly, what is it about what’s happened over the last 20 years that asthma should be more common. Clearly, we use more antibiotics. People are interested in whether or not bacteria will reduce the prevalence of asthma. So, is dirt good? Are infections good for you? No one knows the answer to that quite yet, but it’s certainly under scrutiny and being debated among scientists.
It’s important to recognize that with asthma being more common that we need to be smarter about diagnosing it and recognizing it. We know in schools, for example, that as many of 10 to 15 percent of children will have diagnosed asthma, and another 10 percent will have undiagnosed asthma but have symptoms sufficient that they can’t play as well, they don’t attend school, they don’t sleep through the night. It’s important to recognize that that under-diagnosed population exists in our country, and that it’s growing in number.
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