Title: Pediatric Inner-City Environmental Exposures at School and Home and Asthma Study
Description: Asthma affects 25 million Americans, particularly urban minority children. Children spend nearly all day in school, yet little is known about the role of a child's exposure to widely disseminated industrial chemicals on asthma morbidity. Early animal models and population studies have begun to identify an association between phenolic chemical exposure and asthma development through proposed increased regulation of an individual's allergic immune response. The study population consists of urban school children with physician diagnosis of asthma ages 4 through 13 from the Northeastern United States. In a cross sectional study, we hypothesize that exposure to environmental exposures (e.g. phenols, phthalates, and environmental tobacco smoke) in urban school children and higher urinary biomarkers will preliminarily be associated with higher asthma morbidity. This study, nested within a school-based environmental intervention trial, (School Inner-City Asthma Intervention Study, SICAS2 U01 AI 110397), will evaluate the impact of environmental and personal care product use exposures on these biomarker levels and the impact that these exposures have on asthma morbidity, controlling comprehensively for other personal, home, and school environmental factors associated with asthma outcomes.