Reasons for asthma severity after holidays
Posted on: 12/Feb/2016 12:15:04 PM
If your child is asthmatic, this study may be of great help for you to fight it. You may have observed your child`s asthmatic condition getting worse at specific times of each and every year around the school reopening time during fall and holidays during spring.
Earlier, researchers assumed that the poor air quality at schools are to be blamed. However, a new study made on the issue describes about what gives rise to such seasonal severity of asthma symptoms that even leads to hospitalization.
This may aid in keeping asthmatic children healthy. At such riskiest times, doctors suggest taking extra preventive measures and medications, and schools are insisted to take measures to reduce cold transmission, says Lauren Meyers, professor of integrative biology and statistics and data sciences, University of Texas, Austin.
Such worsened asthma symptoms called Exacerbations are caused by several missed work and school days.
In the earlier studies to identify reasons for exacerbations, virus was detected by practices like swabbing individual patients. Contrarily, Meyers, a mathematical biologist and her crew studied population-wide patterns to know the circulation of common cold in adults and children all through the year, and the role played by viruses.
A computer model was created and here, all the possible driving factors of asthma exacerbations were incorporated. These were compared with output of the model and a larger set of data were obtained. This involved observing over 66000 asthma hospitalizations dotting the cities across Texas for about seven years. Each and every driver was tested independently and the relative impact were determined. This gave out multiple factors required for the data collection
The results were issued on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As per this, there is a large influence of school calendar in spreading cold virus and it is a major driver of asthma exacerbations. Cold transmissions, and other common symptoms are predicted by the school calendar, adds Meyer. This study offers a quantitative relation between these two.
