Epidemiology of Asthma in Children and Adults
Asthma is a globally significant non-communicable disease with major public health consequences for both children and adults, including high morbidity, and mortality in severe cases. We have summarized the evidence on asthma trends, environmental determinants, and long-term impacts while comparing t...
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| Published in: | Frontiers in pediatrics Vol. 7; p. 246 |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Switzerland
Frontiers Media S.A
18.06.2019
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| Subjects: | |
| ISSN: | 2296-2360, 2296-2360 |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Asthma is a globally significant non-communicable disease with major public health consequences for both children and adults, including high morbidity, and mortality in severe cases. We have summarized the evidence on asthma trends, environmental determinants, and long-term impacts while comparing these epidemiological features across childhood asthma and adult asthma. While asthma incidence and prevalence are higher in children, morbidity, and mortality are higher in adults. Childhood asthma is more common in boys while adult asthma is more common in women, and the reversal of this sex difference in prevalence occurs around puberty suggesting sex hormones may play a role in the etiology of asthma. The global epidemic of asthma that has been observed in both children and adults is still continuing, especially in low to middle income countries, although it has subsided in some developed countries. As a heterogeneous disease, distinct asthma phenotypes, and endotypes need to be adequately characterized to develop more accurate and meaningful definitions for use in research and clinical settings. This may be facilitated by new clustering techniques such as latent class analysis, and computational phenotyping methods are being developed to retrieve information from electronic health records using natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to assist in the early diagnosis of asthma. While some important environmental determinants that trigger asthma are well-established, more work is needed to define the role of environmental exposures in the development of asthma in both children and adults. There is increasing evidence that investigation into possible gene-by-environment and environment-by-environment interactions may help to better uncover the determinants of asthma. Therefore, there is an urgent need to further investigate the interrelationship between environmental and genetic determinants to identify high risk groups and key modifiable exposures. For children, asthma may impair airway development and reduce maximally attained lung function, and these lung function deficits may persist into adulthood without additional progressive loss. Adult asthma may accelerate lung function decline and increase the risk of fixed airflow obstruction, with the effect of early onset asthma being greater than late onset asthma. Therefore, in managing asthma, our focus going forward should be firmly on improving not only short-term symptoms, but also the long-term respiratory and other health outcomes. |
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| Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 ObjectType-Review-3 content type line 23 This article was submitted to Pediatric Pulmonology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics Edited by: Steve Turner, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom Reviewed by: P. Gibson, University of Newcastle, Australia; Satish Kumar Madala, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, United States |
| ISSN: | 2296-2360 2296-2360 |
| DOI: | 10.3389/fped.2019.00246 |