Last year, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that an intervention designed to reduce exposures of children with asthma to irritants and allergens at home succeeded in partially curtailing disruptive and sometimes life-threatening symptoms.
The latest part of the multi-center study evaluated the cost-effectiveness of those home-based efforts, which included buying impermeable mattress and pillow covers for each child. It showed that the statistically significant reductions in sickness and associated health-care use substantially offset the intervention's cost.
Expenses arose from administering an allergy skin test, hiring and training high school graduates as environmental counselors, buying air filters and vacuum cleaners and engaging pest management services when needed. Vacuum cleaners served to effectively remove cockroach droppings, dust mites, animal dander and other dirt that can trigger asthma attacks in susceptible people.
The cost per symptom-free day for each child was $25.57, investigators found. Asthmatic children in the study used 13 percent fewer B-agonist inhalers for relieving symptoms over the two-year study.
Dr. Meyer Kattan of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Sally Stearns of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health and colleagues conducted the study. A report on their work appears in the current issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
"We demonstrated that a comprehensive home-based environmental intervention that was tailored to the child's exposures resulted in decreased symptoms and unschedu
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Contact: David Williamson
rdtokids@email.unc.edu
919-962-8596
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
25-Oct-2005