Consistent treatment at home and school can prevent attacks and minimize the need for emergency hospital care. To date, however, medical knowledge has not been enough to ensure that children get basic, high-quality asthma care. The debilitating effects of this condition cause 10 million missed school days each year. By using findings from the AHRQ-funded research described below, clinicians, families, and other decisionmakers can translate medical knowledge into better everyday care for children with asthma. Although asthma is a pervasive problem, it does not affect all groups of children equally.
Poor children are at especially high risk of hospitalization for asthma.
In 1995, half of all pediatric asthma hospitalizations were for children who were either covered by Medicaid or uninsured. Among preschool children with asthma, whites are 3 times as likely as blacks and over 10 times as likely as Hispanics to receive routine drug treatment to prevent future attacks. Many hospitalizations might be avoided if children diagnosed with asthma received adequate primary care. One group of researchers compared children hospitalized for asthma in three cities. They found that children in Boston, where rates of hospitalization are high, were only one-third as likely as children in Rochester, NY, to be on maintenance drug therapy, which helps prevent asthma attacks.