Asthma Literature Review

First, we reviewed several literatures and found that asthma is a growing public health problem in the United States. At the time of the study, the disease was estimated to affect 39.5 million people of which 10.5 million are children age less than 18 years old (CDC, 2011). The highest prevalence was among Black Non-Hispanics (10.5%), Hispanics (10.2%), and Whites (7.9%). Other subgroups with high prevalence rates were children ages 0-15 with a prevalence of (9.4%), American Indians/ Alaska Natives (8.0), Mexicans (5.4%) and (14.4%) among multi-race/other-race persons (CDC, 2011). Secondly, we wanted to know how asthma morbidity affects children in the South Bronx as opposed to children living in the United States. Numerous researches were done to identify both individual and environmental determinants of asthma in children by various institutions such as, the National Institute of allergy and infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Cooperative Inner-City Asthma Study (NCICAS), Division of Allergy and Immunology (DAI), Department of Nutritional Sciences and Department of Sociology and Population Research Center (DNSDSPRC) and The Center for Disease Control (CDC). A total number of 15, 389 children of elementary to middle school age participated and 7,268 parents of children with asthma reported symptoms that their children have through the Child Asthma Risk Assessment Tool (CARAT), Asthma …show more content…
The most commonly used measure is the relative risk that is the association between exposure and the risk factors, such as behavioral and environmental for instance, allergens, cockroaches, rats, mice, air pollutants, tobacco smoke, diesel, development of a related health problem and pessimistic attitudes (feeling as if nothing can be done to alleviate the pain) (Bartholomew et al., 2011).
Behavior of the At-Risk