Asthma Surveillance in the United States

A Review of Current Trends and Knowledge Gaps

¹ The Departments of Health Care Sciences and Medicine, George Washington University Medical Center, Washington, DC
² The Environmental Studies Branch, Office of Analysis and Epidemiology, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control, Hyattsville, MD.

The national population data systems are designed to monitor broad changes in health status of the US population. These data sets have provided valuable surveillance data that constitute our knowledge of the changing trends in asthma. These same data systems are designed to understand major aspects of health and therefore are unlikely to provide much detailed diagnostically specific epidemiologic information. The recent increase in illness and deaths from asthma, as described by the NCHS data systems, suggest important changes that need further investigation. Although much of the NCHS data have been used to define these recent trends, these data have not been fully evaluated to describe the role of subpopulations in this decade of increasing morbidity and mortality. These recent changes in asthma may be driven by single or multiple causes, including increasingly frequent, increasingly severe, or new environmental exposures; changes in medical care, such as pharmacotherapy, or inadequate access to high quality health care. The NCHS data systems do not have adequate information to identify how these factors may be contributing to illness and deaths from asthma. Therefore, further investigations of the factors that are contributing to these trends will have to be conducted with other sources of data.