Asthma diagnosis and treatmentEndogenous and exogenous sex steroid hormones and asthma and wheeze in young women
Section snippets
Study design and subject enrollment
Details of the CHS have been described previously.12, 13 In brief, the CHS was a population-based study that examined the determinants of respiratory health in 6259 school age children (3245 girls and 3014 boys) who were recruited from public school classrooms located in 12 Southern California communities. We recruited 4th grade (n = 2192), 7th grade (n = 1048), and 10th grade (n = 938) students during 1993 and 1994 and another cohort of 4th grade students (n = 2081) during 1995 and 1996. The
Results
Subjects were between 13 and 28 years of age at the time of follow-up, and their mean age was 19.9 years (SD, 3.2 years). The majority of the study participants were non-Hispanic white, more than 50% were exposed to secondhand smoke, and 18.9% were current smokers (Table I). Hispanic-white women were at reduced risk of current wheeze (OR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.50-0.96). Most of the participants (81%) had some form of health insurance. Exposure to secondhand smoke and personal smoking were
Discussion
Our study supports a role for endogenous and exogenous sex hormones in asthma occurrence. We observed that early menarche was associated with increased asthma risk after puberty independent of BMI. We also observed that OC use was associated with increased occurrence of current wheeze among young women with no history of asthma. In marked contrast, women with a history of asthma who used OC had a reduced risk of wheezing. The associations showed significant trends with duration of OC use. These
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Cited by (0)
Supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (grants 5P01ES09581, 5P01ES011627, and 5P30 ES07048), the US Environmental Protection Agency (grants R826708-01 and RD83186101), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (grant 5R01HL61768), the California Air Resources Board (contract 94-331), and the Hastings Foundation.
Disclosure of potential conflict of interest: The authors have declared that they have no conflict of interest.