Neighborhoods with restaurants, entertainment, cultural facilities and ethnic diversity have lower asthma rates in the city of Chicago than neighborhoods where residents are less likely to move, and where there are more churches and not-for-profit facilities.
Published in the spring 2009 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, the two-year study led by Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH, a researcher at Children's Memorial Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, showed that neighborhoods with more community vitality, specifically economic potential, community amenities and social capital had lower asthma rates. The study focused on 287 Chicago neighborhoods, where nearly 50,000 children grades K-8 were screened for asthma. Asthma is the leading chronic childhood illness, affecting more than 9 million children nationwide. Chicago has twice the national average asthma mortality rate.
"Previous studies showed that neighborhoods right next to each other with similar racial makeup had very different asthma rates; we wanted to see what else was going on in each neighborhood to cause such a disparity," said Gupta. "So we looked at specific factors in each neighborhood."