A recent NU medical study has found that Chicago is one of the deadliest cities for pediatric asthma, which affects nearly 9 million children nationwide.
Researchers at the Feinberg School of Medicine recently found that the neighborhood a child lives in greatly influences the likelihood that he or she will suffer from the disease.
Dr. Ruchi Gupta, professor of pediatrics, led a study that investigated racial and neighborhood gaps in asthmatic populations.
"So much work has been done on asthma, but the rates are still increasing," said Gupta, a Children's Memorial Research Center researcher.
"You can't just call it urban asthma, you have to break it down by neighborhood and study it further," she said.
Gupta and her colleagues found that 12.9 percent of Chicago children suffer from the chronic illness, studying more than 50,000 elementary and middle-school students via surveys sent home to their parents.
Even for adjacent neighborhoods, rates could vary by as much as 0 percent to 44 percent.
"Neighborhoods next to each other can have hugely different asthma rates," Gupta said. "We used the surveys and census data to put neighborhood variables into the mix to try to determine the negative and positive factors (that influence asthma rates)."
The study, funded by the Chicago Initiative to Raise Asthma Health Equity, found that in addition to the neighborhood a child lives in, race has a significant impact on childhood asthma rates.
About 20 percent of black children are asthmatic, compared to about 10 percent of white and Hispanic children.
Even within predominantly black neighborhoods, there was widespread variation, Gupta said. Neighborhoods with a white or Hispanic majority also varied from 2 percent to 30 percent and 0 percent to 29 percent, respectively.
"We took neighborhoods with African American populations greater than two-thirds, and found that rates varied from 4 to 44 percent," she said. "It's more than just race."
2008 Woodie Awards
The DAILY encourages you to share your thoughts on this story. Please help us keep the discussion lively, but civil. Comments that are abusive to others, off-topic or vulgar, or comments that misrepresent someone's identity, will not be tolerated. We reserve the right to delete any comments in violation or to close comment threads on articles.
Please e-mail online@dailynorthwestern.com to flag a comment or for more information.
Be the first to comment on this story