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The City Might Not Be To Blame For High Asthma Rates [NPR.org]

Of course, since Philadelphia has done its own ACE survey, y'all know that it's not the city that's to blame for high asthma rates. A good part of it is ACEs. Does anyone in the ACEs Task Force have connections with the researchers mentioned in this story? It might be useful for them to learn about ACEs, the Philadelphia Urban ACE Study, and Dr. Nadine Burke Harris' work in San Francisco, so they'll widen their investigation beyond genetics and physical environment. 

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Asthma affects children regardless of where they live and whether they are rich or poor. But scientists have long thought that living in poor urban neighborhoods adds an extra risk for this troublesome lung inflammation. A new study suggests that's not necessarily the case.

Asthma is often triggered by something in the environment, so in the 1960s, scientists started looking for places where asthma was especially bad.

"Researchers started noting that people living in inner cities like New York, Chicago and Baltimore, had rates of asthma in general and they seemed to have very high rates of hospitalization and emergency room visits," says Dr. Corrine Keet, a pediatric allergist at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

Keet and her colleagues realized that nobody had ever taken a sweeping look to see if what was true in those cities applied nationwide. So they did that study to check those assumptions. Their surprising findings appear in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

 

[For more of this story, written by Richard Harris, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...or-high-asthma-rates]

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Dr. Gabor Mate has some fantastic hypotheses about how asthma results from years of chronic stress and consistently heightened levels of cortisol in the bloodstream. The theory goes like this - cortisol is a hormone released when a person is under stress. Cortisol is known to reduce inflammation in the body. When a child is consistently exposed to stress, he or she massively depletes the body's cortisol supply. As a result, the body has no way to treat inflamed lungs, which typically become inflamed when the body is under stress. What do doctor's prescribe to children with asthma? Cortisol-like hormones in the form of an inhaler. 

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