Do Urban Environmental Pollutants Exacerbate Childhood Lung Diseases?
Epidemiologic studies … suggest that pollutant exposure has a negative impact on postnatal lung development. Childhood lung diseases in the United States are on the rise. This is especially true for chronic respiratory diseases such as allergic asthma, where the incidence among children in polluted inner cities has reached epidemic proportions. We believe that the recent marked increase in the incidence of childhood asthma results from the convergence of six separate factors (three of which are characteristics of lung biology and three of which are environmental factors) that individually would not be sufficient to compromise the respiratory health of children. The first of the biologic factors is the extended period of postnatal life required for complete development of the human lung. For long-lived mammalian species such as humans, this period involves the first 6-8 years of childhood (1).
