Abstract
This study was performed to investigate the relationship between the hospitalization rate for asthma and the ambient carbon monoxide (CO) by examining regional variation of the hospitalization rates for asthma in Korea and its factors. The hospital inpatient claims for asthma were acquired from the National Health Insurance database in 2015. A multivariate linear regression was performed with the hospitalization rate for asthma as a dependent variable. The annual ambient concentration of CO showed a negative association with the hospitalization rates for asthma while that of sulfur dioxide showed a positive association. The number of primary care physicians showed a negative association with the hospitalization rates for asthma while the number of beds in hospitals with less than 300 beds showed a positive association. The negative association of the ambient concentration of CO with the hospitalization rates for asthma showed results upon further investigation.
Highlights
Asthma is the most common chronic respiratory disease, affecting 5% of the population globally [1].As asthma is best understood as an inflammatory disease where immunologic reactions are involved, environmental factors, which are known to induce immunological reactions, have received increasing attention [2]
The regional distribution of hospitalization rates for asthma is presented in Figure 1 and Table 1
This study investigated the geographic distribution of the hospitalization rates for asthma in Korea and its association with the ambient carbon monoxide (CO) and other factors
Summary
Asthma is the most common chronic respiratory disease, affecting 5% of the population globally [1].As asthma is best understood as an inflammatory disease where immunologic reactions are involved, environmental factors, which are known to induce immunological reactions, have received increasing attention [2]. Air pollutants are tempting subjects to study given their well-established association with respiratory diseases [3] and the increase in asthma prevalence in the latter half of the. Despite accumulating evidence that suggests a positive association between air pollutants and asthma incidence, their association remains indefinite in terms of consistency among study results and specificity of their relationship [4,5,6]. While a number of studies have documented a significant association between CO density and elevated mortality and hospital admission [7,8,9], the association with respiratory diseases is ambiguous with mixed findings [10,11]. The study of the relationship between CO and asthma is more limited. While the adverse impact of CO on asthma was observed in some studies [12,13,14], it was reported that an association between the ambient CO density and asthma was unlikely [15,16]
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