Study: Baltimore children moved from high-poverty to low-poverty areas saw their asthma improve

Angela Roberts | The Baltimore Sun

Children with asthma whose families participated in a Baltimore program that helped move them from high-poverty neighborhoods to low-poverty ones saw their disease get significantly better, according to a study published Tuesday.

The children experienced fewer asthma attacks after moving and struggled with symptoms on fewer days — improvements on par with medication used to treat the chronic condition, said Dr. Craig Pollack, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Hopkins School of Nursing and one of the study’s lead authors.

Between 2016 and 2020, Pollack and a team of about a dozen other researchers followed a group of children whose families were working with the Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership — a housing program established as a result of a legal settlement that seeks to combat housing segregation by providing housing vouchers and support to help families move to better resourced neighborhoods.

Before moving, according to the study, families lived in neighborhoods where the median household income was $32,542. After moving, the median household income of their new neighborhoods was $83,333.

The researchers followed each of the 123 children participating in the study for a year after their family’s move.

Before the children moved, about 15.1% had at least one asthma attack every three months. After moving, that percentage decreased to around 8.5%. The number of days children experienced asthma symptoms also decreased from 5.1 days in two weeks to 2.7 days, according to the study.

After moving, families were more likely to report in surveys that they felt safer in their neighborhoods during the day and at night and felt a greater sense of bonding and belonging among their neighbors — a measure called “social cohesion” in the study.

Researchers estimated that reductions in neighborhood-related stressors explained between 29% and 35% of improvements in the children’s asthma.

That finding surprised Pollack and his colleagues, since they expected the biggest driver in improvements in a child’s symptoms would be decreases in allergens such as mice and cockroaches.

Since a child’s asthma often gets better as they grow up, the researchers compared the trajectory of the participating children’s asthma to that of 115 children enrolled in another study, which follows children who live in high-poverty neighborhoods in Baltimore, New York, St. Louis and Boston. Even then, the researchers’ findings remained statistically significant.