Two major asthma epidemiology reports today from CDC. The National Center for Health Statistics released the latest data brief analyzing trends in asthma prevalence, health care utilization and mortality in the US from 2001-2010. Most of the news is not good: Prevalence rates of asthma have reached 8.4 percent, the highest ever recorded in the [...]
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CDC releases National Asthma Control Program state profiles
CDC has set up a new page collecting short (two-page) burden of disease profiles from the 36 National Asthma Control Program grantee states across the US. These summaries highlight key statistical data, such as prevalence and health care use in adults and children, as well as data on patient education and medication use from the [...]
Parents misperceive asthma control in kids
The rise of asthma control and impairment as the main indicators of management has renewed interest in a longstanding challenge: Variability in the perception and experience of asthma symptoms. Parents and children have been shown to differ in their assessments of the existence of asthma, let alone the presence or severity of specific symptoms. And [...]
GE Healthymagination profile of Asthmapolis
The GE Healthymagination blog has an article up today about Asthmapolis that features photos of our new sensor. While you’re there, be sure to check out their great visualization projects (like the Breast Cancer Conversation) and read and recommend some of the entries submitted to their $100m challenge targeting innovation in breast cancer.
Race, socioeconomic status and lung function
For the last two years, John Mullahy and Sheryl Magzamen and I have been working on an analysis of the apparent racial differences in normal lung function and the contribution of socioeconomic status to those patterns. Our goal was to investigate whether alternative statistical methods (quantile regression) might better illustrate the effects of educational achievement [...]
Disease labels in national surveys – the case of COPD
The new CDC Framework for COPD Prevention, much better thought of as a well developed agenda for applied public health, estimates that half of the people with COPD in the US have not been diagnosed. The report – developed by a group of experts during a workshop in 2010 – proposes first among its four [...]
The Economist profile of Asthmapolis
This week The Economist has an article about Asthmapolis in the science section.
Public health, population health, and mHealth
The stabilizing prevalence of asthma and the origins of the disease Statistics Canada recently reported that the prevalence of asthma among 2-7 year old children had declined to its lowest level in more than 10 years, from 13.2 percent in 2000-01 to 9.8 percent in 2008-09, the most recent year for which data are available. [...]
The limits of retrospective health survey questions
The Health Interview Survey, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, asks respondents: “Now, I’d like to read you a short list of different kinds of pain. Please say for each one, on roughly how many days–if any–in the last 12 months you have had that type of pain…How many days in the last [...]
Directed, cooperative exploration of health data
This is an update and expansion of a post I wrote for the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge earlier this summer. The original is here. With the recent launch of the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI) and the emergence of a growing number of health apps, the magnitude of health data and the variety and number [...]
About
Medical anthropologist, asthma epidemiologist in Madison, WI. Co-Founder of Reciprocal Labs and Asthmapolis.
