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New Delhi: A study has found that children in the national capital suffer from higher levels of respiratory problems than children in Karnataka’s Mysore and Kerala’s Kottayam, where pollution levels are very low.
Led by the NGO Lung Care Foundation and Pulmocare Research and Education Foundation based in Delhi and Pune, the study sought to compare the respiratory health of adolescent school children in Delhi’s private schools with those studying in “relatively clean cities in terms of particulate matter”. Of. case air pollution”.
In 2019, Delhi’s annual average pollution level was between 154 and 217 μg/m3 for PM 10 (particulate matter 10) and between 79 and 128 μg/m3 for PM 2.5.
The annual mean PM10 levels in Kottayam and Mysore were around 40–50 μg/m3 and the PM 2.5 levels were between 15 and 30 μg/m3 in the same period.
The study found that children living in Delhi reported significantly higher prevalence rates of cough, shortness of breath, chest pain/tightness, stuffy nose, sneezing, itchy watery eyes, eczema and itchy skin.
It was released on Wednesday and published in peer-reviewed India of lungs magazine.
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Obesity ‘linked’ to asthma in Delhi
The study recruited 928 students from Delhi (55 percent were boys), 1,040 from Kottayam (40 percent boys) and 1,189 from Mysuru (58.4 percent boys), and compared their lung health using a questionnaire, their height and weight, and conducting a spirometry test (to check the functioning of the lungs).
All students were selected from private schools, in order to minimize complications caused by “low socio-economic class, undernutrition, overcrowding and indoor air pollution, risk factors that are relatively common among children attending public schools.” “.
The study compared data for Delhi with the combined numbers for Mysore and Kottayam.
Among its key findings were found that students in Delhi were twice as likely to have chest tightness than students in Mysore and Kottayam – 11.2 per cent in Delhi compared to 4.7 per cent in the other two cities – and much higher rates of shortness of breath. was (10.8 per cent as against 31.5 per cent).
The study also found that more than half of Delhi’s students (55 percent) suffered from sneezing, compared to 39.3 percent in the other two cities, and eczema nearly five times more than the other two (8.7 percent versus 8.7 percent) in Delhi. was more popular. 1.7 percent).
Children in Delhi also reported higher rates of airflow obstruction/asthma (29.3 per cent) than Mysore and Kottayam (22.6 per cent), while the latter was more prevalent with asthma and a family history of smoking.
It also found that children living in Delhi were more likely to be overweight or obese, and that their condition was “strongly associated with airflow obstruction/asthma as defined on spirometry”.
Dr Sandeep Salvi, Director of Pulmocare Research and Education Foundation and one of the researchers of the study, said in a statement: “This is one of the first studies among adolescent school children in India that has shown a strong link between obesity and asthma. , and air pollution may have a direct link between the two. Breathing polluted air can make children obese and increase their risk of developing asthma.
recommendations
In their statement, researchers including lead author Dr Arvind Kumar, founding trustee of the Lung Care Foundation, and Dr Anurag Agarwal, director of CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, recommended in their statement that policy makers “be made aware of the potential link between air Go. Pollution Obesity and Asthma”.
“There is an urgent need to take stringent measures to reduce the ambient air pollution as well as obesity among adolescent children,” he said.
He called for repeating the study with a larger sample size, including students from public schools, “for a greater purpose”.
(Edited by Amit Upadhyay)
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