Ireland has the fourth highest prevalence of childhood asthma symptoms in the world, after the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Ireland also has the highest rate of asthma symptoms in young adults aged 20-44 years. Regina Daly reports.
The findings are contained in a report launched yesterday by the Asthma Society of Ireland, in association with Glaxosmithkline, to mark World Asthma day.
The report entitled "Global Burden of Asthma" was developed by the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
It reveals that some 400,000 people in Ireland have the respiratory disorder. 27 per cent have visited the emergency department at a hospital or had an emergency visit to the GP in the past year, and 37 per cent have been hospitalised at least once in their lifetime.
Irish children miss 10 school days annually due to asthma and adults miss about 12 days from work.
The economic impact is as significant as the social, due to the medical costs such as hospital admissions and the cost of asthma drugs.
Dr Pat Manning, consultant respiratory physician, and Chairman of the Asthma Society of Ireland's Medical Committee says: "People living with asthma are coping with huge social and financial burdens and need help. Our priority is to ensure that cost-effective management approaches, which have been proven to reduce morbidity and mortality, are available to as many people as possible."
He said Ireland's fourth ranking in the world asthma report is a "very serious position to be in and needs to be addressed. It isn't far behind the UK which has the highest ranking in Europe. Asthma is a genetic disorder, but there are increases from one in 20 children to one in five in the past two decades, so there must be an environmental cause. We believe it's related to changes as communities adopt western lifestyles.
"There is on-going research in the Joint Research Centre in Brussels where a major study investigates this further. They are looking at the so-called hygiene hypothesis i.e. that there is an environmental agent which, somewhere in the past, has polarised the immune response to fighting infections.
"In the past the immune response fought infection in the human system and now that there is less infection, the immune response tends towards the development of allergies and asthma."
The Global Burden of Asthma report reveals that 300 million people worldwide now have asthma and this figure is rising.
One in every 250 deaths worldwide is caused by the disorder. Many of the deaths are preventable and are due to inadequate long-term medical care and delays in obtaining help during the final attack.