HOW IMPORTANT IS THE INDOOR ENVIRONMENT IN CHILDHOOD ASTHMA?

In this issue of Thorax we publish two papers on the effects of environmental factors in the home on childhood asthma. In the first study Phoa and colleagues describe a cross sectional study of schoolchildren aged 8–11 in Belmont, Australia. The relation between exposure to fume emitting heaters, currently and during the first year of life, and the risk of asthma was studied. Although there was no association between current use of heaters and asthma, there was an association between exposure to heaters in the first year of life and airway hyperresponsiveness and recent wheeze. In the second study Rumchev and colleagues evaluated the relation between domestic exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and asthma in a case-control study in young children in Perth, Western Australia aged between 6 months and 3 years. They found that cases of asthma were exposed to greater VOC levels than controls and that …