Prevalence, ethnic and gender differences in asthma hospitalization at the US-Mexico Border

Background: A systematic study that provides a better picture of hospitalization prevalence along the US side of the US-Mexico border area is currently unknown, especially if we consider the Border as one epidemiological unit. This creates difficulties in evaluating and monitoring asthma Healthy Border 2010 objective. We evaluated asthma hospitalization discharge for three of the four Border States and compared them between border and non-border clusters of counties.

Methods: We analyzed the 2000 age-adjusted and age-specific hospital discharge rates for discharges with a first-listed diagnosis of asthma (ICD-9 CM – 493). Asthma hospital discharges were further stratified by age, gender, ethnicity, and cluster of border counties and non-border counties within states.

Results: Asthma hospitalization rates were higher for boys than girls < 15 year of age for all border counties. The male/female hospitalization ratios were reversed for those individuals > 15 years of age. A higher hospitalization rate was found for both extremes of the age-group spectrum, resulting in a U-shaped distribution.

For the entire Border, Non-Hispanics reported higher asthma hospitalization rates than Hispanic counterparts.

Conclusions: The results presented in this work are consistent with international asthma prevalence studies, which show a polarization of asthma by sex. It is hoped that the methodology as well as the results of this work can provide a blueprint for future analysis of asthma hospitalization prevalence along the US-Mexico Border, and to serve as an approach to accurately evaluate the success or failure of the Healthy Border 2010 program.