274,280 and rising ....
There has been a huge increase in asthma numbers throughout the developed world in recent years. Ireland is now ranked among the top four in the world. Asthma affects at least one in seven Irish children (that’s 15%), and one in twenty adults (equal to 5%). This is based on the results of international studies which included Ireland.
In order to put an actual figure on this asthma epidemic, we applied the above percentages to the latest available population statistics for Ireland. We took age 16 as the cut-off age for children. Infants under one year of age were excluded from the calculations.
New preliminary figures issued recently in Dublin paint an even more startling picture. As part of the ongoing ISAAC study (International Study on Allergic Asthma in Children), researchers in St James’s Hospital and National Children’s Hospital, Tallaght, have come up with a three per cent increase in asthma prevalence among Irish teenagers in the space of just three years.
In 1995, the researchers studied 3,000 youngsters aged 13-14, randomly selected from 30 schools covering all eight health board areas of Ireland. They discovered that 15.2% had asthma. Three years later in 1998, the researchers studied a different set of 3,000 teenagers aged 13-14 in the same schools. This time they found that 18.3% had asthma.
We look forward to the full report on this part of the study, which is due for publication later this year. Of particular interest will be a follow-up investigation, also carried out in 1998, of the teenagers originally studied in 1995, who are now 16 to 17 years of age. |
