Faniran and colleagues concluded in their community based study of 1178 children that "cough variant asthma is probably a misnomer for most children in the community who have persistent cough" [ 118].
In this study, we use a nationally representative U.S. school based study of adolescents to determine if differences in asthma prevalence between U.S. schools exist and if so, if they are due to the individual risk profiles of students or to a contextual effect of the schools.
To our knowledge, this is the first population-based study of asthma and allergy symptoms among Jamaican children.
This being the first population based study exploring the prevalence of asthma and its determinants in the United Arab Emirates based on the ECRHS.
In a population- based study Grunsven and colleagues found that many asthma patients were not willing to accept asthma treatment.
The review of previously published population- based studies in the elderly suggests a wide variation in the prevalence of asthma (Table 6).
The present school based study was carried out as a component of a research study which explored the prevalence, correlates of asthma among 12-14 year school children and HRQOL among students identified with asthma.
HMO databases offer an opportunity for community based epidemiologic studies of asthma incidence, etiology and treatment.
As expected based on studies of asthma prevalence, which show a sex reversal around puberty, we found that adolescent girls were more at risk for developing asthma than adolescent boys.
We assumed two-sided significance level of 95%, power of 80%, proportion of children with asthma and who had a family history of asthma to be 52%, and Odds' ratio of 2.5, based on a study of asthma in preschoolers by Haby and colleagues [ 7].
Questions on respiratory health were mainly based on the International Study of Asthma and Allergy in Childhood (ISAAC) (Asher et al. 1995), the European Community Respiratory Health Survey (ECRHS) (Janson et al. 2001), and previous school studies in Sweden (Smedje et al. 1997) and in Shanghai, China (Mi et al. 2006).
