JenniferSpartzAnnotation2Disparities

Annotation 2 Population Disparities in Asthma by Diane Gold and Rosalind Wright “Population Disparities in Asthma” was written by two doctors from Harvard Medical School. Gold’s research focuses on environmental exposures and their connections to respiratory diseases while Wright is directed toward chronic respiratory diseases. This gives the notion that they are both well educated in diseases like asthma. They wrote this article to bring together many different studies that have been done in the search for the cause of asthma. The main point of their article is to discuss differences in the importance of asthma depending on one’s location and socioeconomic status. There are huge discrepancies in what is considered important when it comes to this disease. This can be shown simply by the fact that there are a number of different definitions of the disease depending on where one looks. They start by giving a background of the impact asthma has socially and economically; then they move on to supposed causes that have been studied around the country and around the world. The two state that the worldwide literature of different tests for causes was growing in number, but so far no one has said much on the idea that region disparities might have an important impact on what is studied. They attempt to accomplish this by collaborating a great deal of information from various national and international sources such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health Guidelines for Management and Diagnosis of Asthma, ISAAC, the CDC, and various studies from countries like Germany, Switzerland, Australia, and England. A variety of tests and studies were done by outside groups and compiled together in the writing of this article. These studies consisted of health surveys, ethnic comparisons, and the National Cooperative Inner-City Asthma Study which covered asthma inducers in inner-city environments. Overall, there was a wide range of studies covered. However, in the end they all seemed to point back to the same things having higher risks of asthma. For example, urban areas have higher asthma rates over rural areas; poverty over affluence, exposure to animals, air quality, and some family attributes are also seen to cause higher rates of asthma. The most important and probably the most looked over, they argue, is stress. They note at the end that most of these studies are about the things that worsen asthma, not the things that cause it and that the causes may not be fully physical forces. “Future research may need to pay increased attention to social, political, and economic forces that result in marginalization of certain populations in disadvantaged neighborhoods, which may increase exposure to these known environmental risk factors.” The implications of this study are that there is not a single cause that should be studied. Many things contribute to asthma and these are all interconnected. By trying to study just one possible source, many others may be neglected which might be affecting the study of the one source. While in this article they do not completely bring things together, they at least hint that there may be some connection among the sources. “Independent of income and ethnicity, the degree of housing disrepair has been associated with increased cockroach allergen levels…” All of the studies mentioned were discussed because at one point or another it was a trend in the study of asthma. The two also try to be diplomatic about discussing everyone’s ideas on the sources of asthma even though some ideas are weighted more heavily than others (stress). This article shows the expertise of the authors since it admits that there is not just one cause of asthma. They question the causes versus the forces that just make the disease worse. Overall, they try to be impartial on asthma and its contributors even though they emphasize stress as a main cause. This article relates to our research group’s shared questions as it discusses many groups that are not related all focusing on the study of the foundation of asthma. Many of them are government agencies around the world. It is being studied at federal, state, and sometimes city levels. We also learn that people in Europe tend to think in different ways than us while thinking similarly to each other. Whether that has to do with proximity to one another or some causes just not seeming plausible is yet to be determined. Asthma is said to be studied more intently within cities than in rural areas as well.