Educated people suffer less from asthma

Washington, Dec 17 (ANI): A new study has found that individuals suffering from asthma fare much better when they have a stronger educational background.

According to researchers, having less than 12 years of formal schooling is associated with worse asthma symptoms.

Drs. Kim Lavoie and Simon Bacon from the Htpital du Sacri-Coeur de Montrial, Canada, worked with a team of researchers to study asthma severity in a group of 871 adult patients.

"Lower educational achievement was associated with worse asthma control, greater emergency health service use, and worse asthma self-efficacy," they said.

"Patients with less than 12 years of education were 55 percent more likely to report an asthma-related emergency health service visit in the last year," they stated.

The researchers suggest that lower education is often a marker of lower socio-economic status generally, and that this may explain their results.

At the individual level, poorer people may have higher exposures to indoor allergens, such as cockroaches, tobacco smoke and mould, and outdoor urban pollution.

"Although this link between socio-economic status and asthma is well established in children, this is the first study to investigate it in an adult population in Canada," Lavoie said.

"It is noteworthy that patients with less education were more likely to exhibit poor health behaviours that may exacerbate asthma, including smoking and being overweight," she added.

Lavoie and her colleagues hope that once all the mechanisms of the poverty-asthma relationship have been identified, interventions can be developed to improve asthma outcomes in these patients.

The research has been published in BioMed Central's open access journal Respiratory Research. (ANI)