A national survey of asthma prevalence, severity, and treatment in Great Britain.

Abstract

Parents of 5472 children aged 5-17 years from 3209 families were interviewed in a nationwide household survey. In the past year, 15.0% ofchildren had wheezed, 2.2% had more than 12 attacks, and 2.3% had experienced a speech limiting attack. Altogether 4.3% were woken more than once a week by wheezing, 13/1% had doctor diagnosed asthma, and 13*6% had been prescribed antiasthmatic drugs in the past year. With increasing age, morbidity related to wheezing declined to a greater extent than annual period prevalence.The prevalence of wheeze varied little by socioeconomic group, but there were marked trends in all three indices of severity towards increased morbidity in poorer families. Diagnostic labelling and drug treatment ofwheezy children did not differ substantially with socioeconomic status. Thus, a degree of socioeconomic equality exists in the process of medical care for childhood asthma in Britain. This does not appear to have resulted in equality of outcome. (Arch Dis Child 1994; 70: 174-178) of the disease have been largely obtained.6-9The National Study of Health and Growth, which obtained data from a sample of 22 English primary schools after stratification for socioeconomic factors, is less useful for examining the geographical distribution of asthma.4 These existing studies, apart from being out of date, do not provide adequate information on the prevalence of severe asthma, the effect of age, or details of treatment, the main form of control of the disease.The opportunity to address these questions arose from two independent initiatives. The first was the development of a simple 'core' questionnaire designed for large scale epidemiological studies of childhood asthma within and between countries (International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood; ISAAC1I). The second was the commissioning by Allen and Hanburys of a national survey to assess the impact of wheezing illness on children. The resulting study, reported in this paper, describes the prevalence and severity of wheezing illness and asthma in a national sample of children aged 5-17 years. It also considers the relations of wheezing illness to age, sex, social factors, region, and degree of urbanisation.

Indoor and Outdoor Environmental Exposures, Parental Atopy, and Physician-Diagnosed Asthma in Taiwanese Schoolchildren

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