Asthma exacerbations and traffic: examining relationships using link-based traffic metrics and a comprehensive patient database

Details

• Alternative Title:
  Environ Health
• Personal Author:
  Lindgren, Paula ; Johnson, Jean ; Williams, Allan ; Yawn, Barbara ; Pratt, Gregory C.
• Description:
  Background
  
  The Rochester Epidemiology Project (REP) is a unique community-based medical record data linkage system that provides individual patient address, diagnosis and visit information for all hospitalizations, as well as emergency department, urgent care and outpatient clinic visits for asthma. Proximity to traffic is known to be associated with asthma exacerbations and severity. Our null hypothesis was that there is no association between residential proximity to traffic and asthma exacerbations over eleven years of REP data.
  
  Methods
  
  Spatial coordinates of the homes of 19,915 individuals diagnosed with asthma were extracted from the REP database. Three metrics of traffic exposure at residences were calculated from link-based traffic count data. We used exploratory statistics as well as logistic and Poisson regression to examine associations between three traffic metrics at the home address and asthma exacerbations.
  
  Results
  
  Asthma exacerbations increased as traffic levels near the home increased. Proximity to traffic was a significant predictor of asthma exacerbations in logistic and Poisson regressions controlling for age, gender and block group poverty.
  
  Conclusions
  
  Over eleven years in a comprehensive county-wide data set of asthma patients, and after controlling for demographic effects, we found evidence that living in proximity to traffic increased the risk of asthma exacerbations.
  
  
• Subjects:
  Adolescent Adult Aged Asthma Child Child, Preschool Databases, Factual Environmental Exposure Female Housing Humans Infant Infant, Newborn Male Middle Aged Regression Analysis Vehicle Emissions Young Adult

  More +
• Source:
  Environ Health. 15.
• Pubmed ID:
  27809853
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC5094142
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  R01 AG034676/AG/NIA NIH HHS/United States ; U38 EH000617/EH/NCEH CDC HHS/United States
• Place as Subject:
  Minnesota
• Volume:
  15
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:c598e40bd11912f0de67c2b66f3b4bfd8806e74f21bb1157e4e45efff51efe74
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/43065/cdc_43065_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 897.02 KB ]