
DATE: Thursday, May 8, 1997                 TAG: 9705080422

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: FROM WIRE REPORTS 

DATELINE: BOSTON                            LENGTH:   65 lines

STUDY LINKS COCKROACHES TO ASTHMA

BOSTON - The nasty, lowly cockroach has been found to be the leading cause of the high level of asthma among children in inner cities.

``It proves what we suspected was really true,'' said Dr. David L. Rosenstreich of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, lead author of the study.

The finding could have a big impact on the way parents are educated to lessen the severity of asthma in children who are already sick and to reduce the risk for those who are still healthy.

Already, the researchers say, several public health departments have begun new cockroach control programs as a way of combating asthma.

Asthma is on the rise in cities and suburbs alike, but rates in inner cities often double those found elsewhere. A major study attempted to learn the reason for this burden.

So in seven cities, researchers looked at many things that may cause asthma, such as cats, smoking, microscopic bugs called dust mites and the use of gas ranges for heat.

The conclusion, as experts had long suspected, was that children are at high risk of asthma attacks if they are allergic to cockroaches and their homes show high levels of the insects' body parts and droppings.

``The only thing that really stood out was that the children who had a lot of cockroach exposure in their bedrooms seemed to be a lot sicker,'' Rosenstreich said.

The result is uncommonly high rates of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, periods of breathing difficulty, missed school days and sleep-deprived nights, the study said.

The study, which will be published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, now will focus on eradicating cockroaches from living spaces and monitoring the children's health to see if it improves. The cities in the study were in New York, St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Washington.

Cockroaches cause about 25 percent of all asthma in inner-city areas, Rosenstreich estimated. But he said the study did not answer the question of why the incidence and severity of asthma cases had been rising in the United States and worldwide for 20 years.

According to the American Lung Association, there are 15 million asthmatics in this country, and nearly one-third are children under 18. The number of cases has risen by two-thirds since 1980, with a disportionate amount of the increase among lower-income Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans and children.

Asthma is a chronic, inflammatory disease often brought on by allergic reactions that results in narrowed airways in the lungs. Symptoms range from mild shortness of breath to severe airway obstruction that can result in wheezing or, in about 5,000 cases a year, death. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic ASTHMA HITS HARD LOCALLY

Asthma is the No. 1 reason for admission to Children's Hospital

of The King's Daughters and the third most common reason children

are seen in the Norfolk hospital's emergency room.

Children in Norfolk, Portsmouth and Suffolk are twice as likely

as children throughout the state to be hospitalized for asthma.

The disease strikes particularly hard among children who live in

poverty. One reason is that poor children are exposed to more

pollutants, like cigarette smoke and cockroach droppings, that

trigger attacks. KEYWORDS: ASTHMA STUDY ROACHES