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Monday, April 21, 2003A study has found that one of every four children in central Harlem has asthma, which is double the rate researchers expected to find and, experts say, is one of the highest rates ever documented for an American neighborhood. Researchers say the figures, from an effort based at Harlem Hospital Center to test every child in a 24-block area, could indicate that the incidence of asthma is even higher in poor, urban areas than was previously believed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that about 6 percent of all Americans have asthma; the rate is believed to have doubled since 1980, but no one knows why. New York City is thought to have a higher rate than other major cities, but that, too, is something of a mystery. The disease kills 5,000 people nationally each year... ....beginning last year, a team at the hospital set out to screen all of the roughly 2,200 children under 13 who live or attend school in the zone, asking about symptoms, listening to their lungs and measuring the rate at which they can exhale into a tube. So far, the parents of 1,401 of the children have filled out questionnaires intended to detect possible signs of asthma, like nighttime coughing and wheezing, and 967 of the children have actually been examined. Nearly all of those tested so far are of school age, leaving out the younger children, in whom it can be hard to distinguish asthma from the respiratory ailments common to toddlers. The project staff aims to screen all the children by this summer and then to publish its findings. You have to wonder why they publicized it before publishing it. The high rate may be real, or it may not be. Not to be Clintonian about it, but everything depends on how you define asthma. Not everything a parent describes as wheezing is wheezing, sometimes it’s just noisy congestion that clears with a good hard cough. And not every night-time cough is asthma. The article points this out, but briefly, not very explicitly, and far into the story: Herman Mitchell, an epidemiologist who is a leader in asthma research coordinated by the National Institutes of Health, cautioned that studies could differ simply because there were problems in defining asthma and in making an accurate diagnosis. Of the Harlem findings, he said: "This is certainly one of the highest rates attributed in the United States, if not the highest. What they're doing is quite exceptional in scope and it sounds like it's good methodology, but until they publish and lay it out, it's hard to judge." No matter. It will now be a widely held truth and matter of fact that kids in Harlem have higher rates of asthma than anywhere else. It’s been in the Times and just about every other newspaper in the land thanks to syndication. That’s one of the advantages of publishing your studies in newspapers instead of medical journals. You avoid scrutiny of your methodology, gain praise for your work, and insure more future research dollars. posted by Sydney on 4/21/2003 08:14:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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