Asthma Rates Are Dropping In Children

A government study shows that asthma rates among U.S. children have dropped after a decades-long increase.

Officials believe that the change may be due to declines in both childhood obesity rates and air pollution.

"That was a big surprise," said Lara Akinbami of the National Center for Health Statistics.
"We were expecting the increase to kind of continue. But in fact we saw the opposite."

While the percentage of U.S. children with asthma doubled in the 1980s and 1990s and had been steadily increasing since, new information from the report shows that asthma prevalence among children ages 17 and younger increased to 9.7 percent in 2011 and then remained stagnant until 2013, when it declined to 8.3 percent.

Researchers discovered the change when examining data from the National health Interview survey, which took place between 2001 and 2013.

However, asthma still continues to rise among children in the poorer families--with more than14 percent of black children having asthma when compared to 8 percent of white children.

The findings are published in the journal Pediatrics.

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