, according to a new study presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
While links between asthma and low-quality housing prone to harboring allergens have been well-documented, the current study takes the extra step of looking at housing down to the level of individual land parcels and suggests that asthma hospital visits can be used to identify hazardous housing earlier.
“Emergency department visits for asthma provide a leading indicator that can be used by health departments or housing authorities to direct housing inspections and remediation of poor housing conditions, track improvements in housing quality, measure housing department performance, support resident grievances, and inform funding allocation decisions,” said the study’s lead researcher, Elizabeth Samuels, MD, who is assistant professor of epidemiology and emergency medicine at Brown University, Providence, R.I.
Researchers retrospectively looked at cases of children and adults in the Greater New Haven area of Connecticut seen at the Yale New Haven Hospital ED for asthma-related problems between March 2013 and August 2017. The region has the fifth-highest prevalence of asthma in the United States, the researchers point out, due to its air quality, pollens, and quality of its housing. More than half of residences were built before 1,940, compared with about 13% nationally. Patient addresses were matched with HUD inspection records.
The review encompassed 11,429 ED visits by 6,366 individuals; 54% were insured by Medicaid, and 42% were Black. Controlling for patient and neighborhood data, researchers found that increased asthma ED visits at the parcel level were associated with decreased HUD inspection scores to a highly significant degree (P < .001).
They also found that there was a relationship in terms of timing between asthma ED visits and inspection scores: asthma ED visits increased more than 1 year before a failed HUD inspection. They also found that asthma ED visits were not elevated at housing units that passed inspection. Using asthma ED visits to predict failed housing inspections produced a specificity rate of 92.3% in an adjusted model, Dr. Samuels noted.
“This approach represents a novel method of early identification of dangerous housing conditions, which could aid in the prevention of asthma-related morbidity and mortality,” Dr. Samuels said.
The investigators noted that, of the parcels with the top three incidence rates of asthma ED visits, “all of them have been closed or demolished.”
In addition to limiting exposure of patients with asthma to the allergens of mold, mice and rats, and cockroaches, improving poor-quality housing earlier could help asthma by reducing stress, she said.
“There is also an increasing evidence base that psychosocial stress increases the risk of asthma attacks, and it’s therefore possible that living in poor housing conditions – often highly stressful situations – drives exacerbation risk via this pathway,” she said. “Synergistic effects between these pathways are also possible or even likely.”
Neeta Thakur, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who researches asthma, said the findings could lead to a strategy for improving poor-quality housing more quickly. As it is, inspections are too infrequent, often prompted by resident complaints.
“Once the complaints get to a certain threshold, then there might be an inspection that happens, and if there is a periodic review of the buildings, they often happen few and far between,” she said. “We could actually use some of the information that we’re already getting from something like ED visits and see if there is a pattern.”
An important follow-up would be to see whether asthma outcomes improve after housing deficiencies are addressed and whether the predictive capacity of ED visits occurs in other places.
“Would you then see a decline in the ED visit rates from individuals living in those buildings?” Dr. Thakur said. “It’s important to find a leading indicator, but you want to be sure that that leading indicator is useful as something that can be intervened upon.”
Dr. Samuels and Dr. Thakur have reported no relevant financial relationships.