The Epidemiology of Asthma During Pregnancy: Prevalence, Diagnosis, and Symptoms
Section snippets
Data sources
The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is a cross-sectional survey, which is planned and conducted in conjunction with the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Since its inception in 1957, the NHIS has been the primary source of general health information on the civilian, noninstitutionalized population of the United States, and the primary source of asthma prevalence data in the nonpregnant population of the United States [6]. A 1997 survey redesign added questions about asthma that inquired
How valid are survey data on asthma prevalence?
Survey prevalence data are heavily dependent on the diagnosis of asthma by a doctor or health professional (see Table 1). Other studies that use chart review, administrative databases, or medical records also frequently depend on clinical diagnoses and other information that requires an encounter with the health care system. We are unaware of specific studies that examined diagnostic validity in pregnant women; however, it is likely that issues in diagnosing asthma in nonpregnant women are
Symptoms and medication use
If asthma diagnoses have uncertain validity, is it possible to study asthma symptoms and asthma medication use, and what is the relationship between diagnosis, symptoms, and medication? Epidemiologic data on asthmatic pregnant women is sparse; many studies provide information only on the diagnosis of asthma, rather than on the frequency of symptoms and medication use related to asthma. In this section, we describe data from the women who had physician-diagnosed asthma from our cohort study that
Summary
We demonstrated that asthma remains a common condition among pregnant women and that the prevalence of self-reported asthma in the United States is between 8.4% and 8.8%. In addition, approximately 4.1% of all pregnant women experienced an asthma attack in the previous year. Prevalence rates in other countries seem to be higher or substantially lower; however, further characterization of international trends using nationally representative data is needed. Data from a large prospective cohort
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This work was supported with grants AI41040 and DA05484 from the National Institutes of Health and the Kellogg Scholars in Health Disparities Program.