Asthma education aids inner-city Latinos
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An education program designed for Latino asthma sufferers has shown promise for improving patients’ asthma control and quality of life, according to researchers.
Their study, of 198 asthmatic adults living in a predominately Hispanic area of New York City, found that a “culturally directed” asthma education program helped cut hospital visits for asthma attacks and lessen the burden the lung disease put on patients’ lives.
The findings are published in the medical journal Chest.
While asthma has been on the rise throughout the U.S. for the past two decades, it disproportionately affects inner-city neighborhoods—with factors such as air pollution and poor housing conditions playing a role.
Nationally, Hispanic Americans have a relatively low rate of asthma, but in New York City, there is a high prevalence of the disease among Latino adults.
One reason for the discrepancy is that the term “Hispanic” is used to describe a wide variety of populations. For example, while people of Mexican descent have a low rate of asthma, the condition is much more common among Puerto Rican and Dominican populations in the U.S., explained study co-author Dr. Emily DiMango, of Columbia University Medical Center in New York.
She and her colleagues focused their asthma education effort on a New York neighborhood with a large Dominican population and a high rate of poverty. The program included the help of two people from the community who were trained to be asthma educators and met with study patients to reinforce the instructions asthma-clinic doctors had given them.
Patients learned about the chronic airway inflammation that marks asthma, as well as how to properly use inhalers and peak flow meters, which help monitor lung function, and how to avoid common triggers of asthma attacks.
In addition, DiMango told Reuters Health, asthma educators helped patients who lived in substandard housing get in contact with their landlords or with city health officials. Living conditions are important in asthma control because environmental factors, such as cockroach droppings and indoor mold, can trigger attacks of breathlessness, chest tightness and wheezing.
Overall, the study found, the education program cut patients’ emergency room visits by 40 percent and hospitalizations by 36 percent over one year. Study participants also reported gains in quality of life.
According to DiMango, the findings highlight the importance of teaching people with asthma to treat the condition as chronic, rather than as a series of acute symptom attacks.
“The message,” she said, “is to take daily therapy to reduce airway inflammation and thereby reduce asthma attacks requiring ER visits.” Continual asthma management is necessary, she noted, even when a person does not have daily symptoms.
SOURCE: Chest, September 15, 2005.
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