Exhaust gases cause asthma more often than expected

Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.

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Air pollution can irritate the airways and cause asthma. In the British city of Bradford, researchers attribute more than one in three new cases to air pollution from nitrogen oxides.

The scientists around Dr. Haneen Khreis from the Institute for Transport Studies at Leeds used a special computer model to compare the impact of traffic and other emissions, the atmospheric distribution of pollutants and health data.

Every fourth case can be attributed to exhaust fumes

Almost every fourth asthma case was caused by car exhaust fumes - especially those from diesel vehicles, the researchers found. Another 14 percent was caused by other sources of nitrogen oxide emissions such as heating and industrial emissions. With the help of the model, it has now been possible to demonstrate for the first time how great the load from the various nitrogen oxide sources actually is.

Reduce traffic around schools

"Traffic has a much larger share of asthma cases than we had previously suspected," says study director Khreis. This shows that a large proportion of the cases could be avoided.

Measures that reduce the volume of traffic around debts and kindergartens should therefore be implemented as quickly as possible. In addition, footpaths should be planned further away from streets in the future.

The city of Bradford is known for having an above-average number of children there who develop asthma. The city has been continuously measuring the air quality in its district since 1999.

Asthma on the rise

Asthma is the most common chronic disease in children and adolescents. Since the 1950s, the number of asthma cases has increased steadily in the industrialized nations. According to the Robert Koch Institute, 9.2 percent of the population in Germany suffer from it. Children and adolescents are particularly often affected: up to 15 percent of them suffer from asthma. In some of them, however, the lung disease disappears again in the course of life.

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