Exploring the relationship between physical and social environmental factors and asthma exacerbation in children: Results of the Community Action Against Asthma baseline measurements

Community Action Against Asthma (CAAA) is a community-based participatory research partnership in Detroit, Michigan. CAAA's research focuses on exploring social and physical environmental triggers for childhood asthma and designing of interventions to reduce those triggers and improve children's asthma-related health. This presentation will describe both the participatory process of survey design as well as present the results of baseline measurements (e.g. survey of a household environmental intervention and lung function measurements) . Based on input from both community and academic partners, the survey included questions assessing: the child's asthma-related health status and medication use; the household physical environment; behaviors influencing indoor environmental triggers; caregiver's stress, social support, and depressive symptoms; perception of neighborhood social environment (e.g., sense of community; neighborhood level stressors). Lung function measures were collected with a handheld portable spirometer. Ninety-nine families residing in the Detroit, with at least one child aged 6-12 with known or probably asthma, have enrolled and their caregivers have completed the baseline measurements. An addition 21 families are in the process of completing baseline measurements. Of the 99 families enrolled and completing baseline measurements, 88.0% are African-American; 9.0% are Latino and 3.0% are Caucasian/White. Results will be presented of analysis of the association between the caregivers' perceptions of personal, social and physical environmental stressors and protective factors and the child's asthma-related health status. Lessons learned from using a CBPR approach in designing and administering a survey and the implications of the findings for interventions and policy change will be discussed.