Since 1995, the ongoing Black Women's Health Study (BWHS) has been documenting the higher rates of many illnesses that disproportionately affect African American women, such as hypertension, breast cancer, diabetes, stroke, and lupus. Led by researchers at Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center, the BWHS has followed 59,000 African American women through a biennial questionnaire.
Now, the latest research from BWHS released in December found that black women who reported suffering abuse before age 11 had a greater likelihood of adult-onset asthma compared to women whose childhood and adolescence were free of abuse.
The study, published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, was led by Patricia Coogan, senior epidemiologist at SEC and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. Coogan followed 28,456 African American women from 1995 through 2011 who completed questionnaires on physical and sexual abuse during childhood or adolescence. What she found was that adult-onset asthma increased by more than 20 percent among women abused during childhood. What’s interesting is that the evidence was stronger for physical abuse than for sexual abuse, and there was little indication that abuse during adolescence (ages 12 through 18) was associated with the risk of asthma.
"The results suggest that chronic stress contributes to asthma onset, even years later," said Coogan who hypothesized the link between childhood abuse and asthma incidence is stress and its physiological effects on the immune system and airway development.
According to 2010 statistics from the United States Department of Health and Human Service National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, 695,000 children up to age 17 were identified as neglected or abused with 22 percent being African American. Studies also show that asthma is more prevalent in African Americans.
This isn’t the first time Coogan and the Slone Center has used BWHS data to track health-related breathing problems in African American women. A previous study linked long-term exposure to air pollution as a risk of developing type 2 diabetes in African American women living in Los Angeles.
That study found that with every increase in exposure to traffic-related nitrous oxide of about 12 parts per billion, the risk of diabetes increased 24 percent. While the study did not account for undiagnosed diabetes or prove pollution causes diabetes, Coogan and her team of researchers now have federal funding to expand the study to nearly 60,000 African American women in 27 states.
That study will take another five years, but the results will be worth it.