NIH+Data+Annotation+4

Michelle Cullum Annotation 4 National Institutes of Health National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute __Data Fact Sheet__ __“__Asthma ranks among the most common chronic conditions in the United States, affecting an estimated 14.9 million persons in 1995 and causing over 1.5 million emergency department visits, about 500,000 hospitalizations, and over 5,500 deaths.”  Unlike the previous three articles, this NIH document is a portrayal of national asthma data from 1995 to 2009. Because asthma is such a difficult disease to characterize, both by way of symptoms and causes, it was important to analyze what ages and races were recognized and what information that data was gathered from. Moreover, the NIH is associated with an extremely high level of esteem and respect, and thus the information is less likely to be biased or hastily gathered and examined. These data sets are especially important in that they answer the question of how the United States accounts for asthma and who continually maintain the numbers. Following this report, it will be of utmost importance to compare these findings to those of other national organizations in order to compare methodology and results. These particular data begin with asthma prevalence rates per 1,000 that have been broken down by age groups, gender, and race. Interestingly, over the last 9 years certain trends in asthma have appeared. Overall, the incidence of asthma has been higher in children over adults and in African Americans of Caucasians. On a broader scope, women are more prone to asthma than males; yet in children, the gender susceptibility switches. Most shockingly, the prevalence of asthma has been rising since the mid 1980’s and expect to keep increasing over time as pollution, air quality, and other asthma triggers increase. Contrary to other studies, the NIH work examines hospital and emergency rooms visits to track age differences in asthma rather than strictly asthma prevalence in a general sense. It has been shown that the overall age-adjusted rate of emergency hospitalizations has increased especially among females, driving the gender differences. These gender differences are often attributed to genetic differences and stress, as opposed to environmental exposures. Hospitalizations, like emergency room visits, have a higher rate in females, with an overall increase of 19.5 people per 10,000 patients in 1995. Today that number has risen to over 22 patients per the same 10,000 total. Furthermore, the rate amongst African American’s was three times that of Caucasians; however, the length of time one was in the hospital remained constant. When tallying this data, it is important to recognize the gaps in health care and medical coverage that will influence hospital visits and even more importantly how long a patient remains in the facility.

One key pitfall of these findings is that the NIH only gathered data on white’s and black’s when in fact other minorities, such as Puerto Rican’s, often have a higher asthma rate than the aforementioned groups. Furthermore, this oversight seems rather odd considering the great detail the organization put into breaking the specific age groups into 4 different groups. This article did nothing to explain the causes or triggers of asthma, but rather just report the data. This kind of empirical research shows how the collected data can then be published and accessed by the public. Since the research was written in common language, it makes the overall data accessible to nearly everyone.