The prevalence of asthma and the role of occupational exposures was investigated in a cross-sectional study of 498 Montreal adults aged 20 to 44 years. Prevalences of asthma standardised for age and gender, using four definitions were: current wheeze: 23 8%, asthma symptoms and/or medicine: 12.9%, airway hyper-responsiveness: 15.1%, airway hyper-responsiveness and current wheeze: 7.0%. Imputation to adjust for non-response to airway challenge gave similar results. 56.9% of subjects reported occupational exposure ever to sensitisers and 10.8% to irritants. Current wheeze was associated with exposure to irritants (OR: 2.12 (1.03, 4.34)), and airway hyper-responsiveness with exposure to sensitisers (OR: 2.20 (1.10, 4.38)). Childhood asthma and atopy did not affect the associations. Population attributable risk was about 30% for airway hyper-responsiveness with exposure to sensitisers, and 5% for current wheeze with exposure to irritants. Studies with more precise exposure information may provide better evidence for the causality of the association.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.21539 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Demir, Ahmet Uur. |
| Contributors | Becklake, Margaret (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001650064, proquestno: MQ50754, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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