As per a recent study, living in urban areas can make asthma worse for your children. These findings were published in Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology. The study shows that urban living is a strong independent risk factor for increased asthma morbidity – defined as higher rates of asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalisations – but urban living does not increase the risk for having asthma. “Our findings serve as evidence that there are differences between risk factors linked to developing asthma and those linked to making asthma worse if you already have it,” says Corinne Keet, MD, PhD, associate professor of paediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the paper`s lead author. In the past, a few studies have been conducted on a national level to determine the effects of inner-city living on both asthma prevalence and severity. While Keet`s work published in 2015 using a national survey showed that living in an urban area was not a risk factor for having asthma, that study didn`t allow for analysis of asthma morbidity. The research team sought to determine those effects by analysing information gathered by the US Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services on the health care utilisation of 16,860,716 children ages 5 to 19, who were enrolled in Medicaid in 2009 and 2010. The team first narrowed the pool of data to children who had at least one asthma-related outpatient or Emergency Department visit over the two-year period. Based on the county they lived in, these 1,534,820 children were categorized by urbanization status and based on their ZIP code, categorized as living in a poor or not poor neighbourhood. The team excluded states that were missing more than 10 percent of data on race/ethnicity, states in which all major race/ethnicity groups were not represented and states that did not have urban areas. The results for 18 states that met the study`s final guidelines showed that children who lived in nonurban areas were 18 to 21 percent less likely to be at risk for hospitalizations, even after accounting for race/ethnicity. The researchers also found that compared to non-Hispanic white children, black children and children of “other” races had 89 and 61 percent, respectively, higher risks of asthma-related hospitalisations.