Asthma and Obesity in Children:

Asthma and Obesity in Children: Evaluating the Research

Serious and chronic conditions in children could have been avoided take a serious toll on some of the most vulnerable within today's modern population. It is horrible to see so many children afflicted by conditions that may haunt him the rest of their lives, especially if such conditions could have been avoided by simple adjustment in their environment. The research being evaluated here shows a study conducted by Suglia et al. (2011) focusing on exploring the relationship between obesity and asthma with a child's environmental conditions. As such, the research aims to help understand potentially preventable environmental conditions as a way to help promote healthier lifestyles that help children avoid such long-lasting conditions, such as asthma and obesity.

The overall subject of childhood obesity is controversial, and its relationship to asthma is still relatively unknown. Prior discourse has a gap in the research in regards to characteristics of asthma seen in obese children. Similar to the national rates of obesity in children, rates of childhood asthma levels have also been increasing dramatically. That is, prior research based on decades-old data posited asthma as stemming most often from environmental conditions. Yet clearly, there is something within the changing modern environment that is increasing the risk to these dangerous conditions. Suglia et al. (2011) investigate the potential relationship between environmental variables in the rates of childhood asthma and obesity, working specifically with the demographic of three-year-old urban children. The hypotheses posited that there were more factors in regards to risk of asthma that were more influential in younger children other than physical environmental factors. The study believed that both the president of obesity and the combination of psychosocial environmental factors were just as prevalent, if not more as the physical environment in regards to the influence on rates of asthma. Psychosocial factors like maternal depression and intimate partner violence, or domestic violence, would also be influential in asthma and obesity rates of young children around the age of three.

To explore this issue further, researchers created variables to represent various factors in the situation. The study used a complicated methodological procedure. Rates of asthma and obesity were used as the dependent variable, which was impacted on various levels by independent variables coming from the external urban environment in which the children were living in. Primary data collection was through interviews with the mother, with follow-up interviews at 12 and 36 months of age. Overall, 1815 families participated in the study. Participants included a number of three-year-old children who had been suffering from obesity and asthma. Eligibility for the children was determined by the mother's presentation of a medical diagnosis of asthma within the past 12 months (Suglia, 2011). To determine eligibility for a diagnosis of obesity, the children's height and weight were analyzed to categorize them based on weight categories. Then, more abstract data of environmental conditions was collected. This focused most on the social environment of the children's home and family. Particular categories were particularly explored, such as the depression of the child's mother, and the presence of domestic violence, as well as external environmental factors in the physical urban space in which the child was living in. Psychosocial factors were especially important, as they were key to helping unlock some of the components of the hypotheses. Logistic regression was used to analyze the relationship between the dependent variable of the presence of asthma in the various independent variables that were thought to affect it.