This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Patrick T. Dowling, MD, MPH
Los Angeles County Harbor—UCLA Medical Center Torrance, Calif

JAMA. 1991;265(6):725.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor. —

The improved outcomes for low—birth-weight infants born in the 1970s might account for a portion of the increase in asthma morbidity and mortality in the United States for the period 1980 through 1987 as documented by Weiss and Wagener.¹

With the evolution of perinatal medicine and the widespread development of neonatal intensive care units, the neonatal death rate for very low—birth-weight infants plummeted (Table).

However, many of these survivors of neonatal intensive care units were plagued with long-term disabilities, such as bronchopulmonary dysplasia, that would put them at risk for chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma.²

It is possible that, as this cohort of high-risk survivors, which was disproportionately poor, nonwhite, and urban (the location of the neonatal intensive care units), became young children in the 1980s, those who developed asthma experienced an increased morbidity and mortality because of decreased primary care access secondary . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?