Background: Asthma is one of the most frequent causes of preventable hospital admissions among children.
Objectives: To identify preventable risk factors for future hospital admissions. Some of the environmental and patient characteristics of children who were hospitalized more than once with an acute asthma attack were investigated.
Design, setting and patients: An analysis was performed of 140 children with asthma, aged three to 15 years, admitted to the Department of Pediatrics at Dicle University Hospital, Diyarbakir, Turkey, over three years, followed for a maximum of 48 months. Associations between hospital admissions and probable predictors (clinical findings, laboratory studies and a detailed case history) were analyzed.
Results: The asthma admissions were higher in boys than in girls (male to female ratio 1.86). Of 140 children, 30 (21.4%) had multiple admissions, defined as a mean of more than one admission per year during the follow-up period. The following factors were associated significantly with the frequency of hospital admission for asthma attacks when analyzed using a Chi2 test: indoor cigarette smoking (odds ratio [OR] 2.55), maternal smoking (OR 4.05), symptoms of dermal atopy (OR 2.96), symptoms of allergic conjunctivitis (OR 2.68), age less than five years (OR 5.12) and use of inhaled corticosteroids during the follow-up (OR 0.37). With multi-variate logistic regression analysis, among other factors, only maternal smoking (r=0.29, P=0.017) and age less than five years (r=-0.32, P=0.012) were significant effective factors for the multiple hospital admissions. No significant association with the frequency of hospital admission was found for sex, serum total immunoglobulin E, history of frequent upper respiratory tract infections or number of family members.
Conclusions: Prevention of indoor smoking, especially maternal smoking, may be effective in decreasing hospital admissions in children with asthma. Children less than five years of age are more likely to be hospitalized than are children five years of age or greater.