Asthma Program, Indoor Environments Section, Ohio Department of Health (2009) - full report

Key Findings

• According to the 2006 Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System, 13.6 percent of Ohio adults have been told at some time in their life that they had asthma, and approximately 9.8 percent reported that they currently had asthma.

• Current asthma prevalence among adults in Ohio has increased since 2000.

• There were significant associations between asthma prevalence and common demographic factors such as race/ethnicity, educational attainment or household income.

• Each year in Ohio, there are approximately 18,000 hospitalizations and 63,000 emergency department visits with asthma as the primary diagnosis. This number is steadily increasing.

• Women had consistently higher rates than men for both hospitalizations and emergency department visits for primary diagnoses of asthma.

• Ohio’s emergency department visit rate for children under 5 is approximately twice the Healthy People 2010 goal of 80 per 10,000 residents.

• Each year in Ohio, there are on average 160 asthma-related deaths. Most of these deaths are preventable with appropriate care and medication.

• Along with significant differences in asthma prevalence, African-Americans were two to three times as likely to die from asthma as whites.

• Children in households with annual incomes of less than $25,000 were more likely than those with higher annual household incomes to have more than one emergency department visit for asthma.

• Parents who reported a child having asthma are significantly more likely to face a variety of health care-access issues than parents who do not have a child with asthma.

See the full report

See the full report