Topic importance: Asthma is a common and complex lung disease in children, with disproportionally higher prevalence and related adverse outcomes among children in racial and ethnic minority groups, and of lower socioeconomic position. Environmental factors, including unhealthy housing and school-based exposures, can contribute to increased asthma morbidity and widening disparities. This underscores a significant environmental justice issue and suggests the need for clinical interventions to reduce sources of environmental exposures and ultimately diminish the observed disparities in childhood asthma.
Review findings: Unhealthy housing conditions, including secondhand tobacco smoke, allergen exposure, and indoor air pollution, can exacerbate asthma symptoms in children. Although unhealthy housing can occur anywhere, such situations most frequently occur in urban, low-income environments where renting is common. To reduce environmental triggers, clinicians can recommend smoking cessation, cleaning techniques to mitigate exposure, and even directly contacting landlords to address poor housing conditions. Children spend much of their time in schools, where this built environment is also a source of asthma triggers (eg, poor ventilation) and allergens (eg, mold and pests, chemicals). As such, a multidisciplinary approach is needed to adequately address the burden of childhood asthma to equitably reduce disparities to both harmful exposures and negative health outcomes.
Summary: Racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities exist in asthma morbidity in children, and such disparities are driven in part by environmental factors at the housing and school level. Clinicians can make evidence-based recommendations to drive effective exposure reduction strategies to mitigate asthma morbidity and reduce observed disparities.
Keywords: asthma; children; disparities; environmental factors; housing conditions; schools.
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