Reports from University of Pavia Describe Recent Advances in Asthma (Spatial Enablement To Support Environmental, Demographic, Socioeconomics, and Health Data Integration and Analysis for Big Cities: a Case Study With Asthma Hospitalizations In …)

2019 MAY 17 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Investigators publish new report on Lung Diseases and Conditions - Asthma. According to news reporting out of Pavia, Italy, by NewsRx editors, research stated, “The percentage of the world’s population living in urban areas is projected to increase in the next decades. Big cities are heterogeneous environments in which socioeconomic and environmental differences among the neighborhoods are often very pronounced.”

Financial support for this research came from European Commission Horizon 2020 Framework programme.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from the University of Pavia, “Each individual, during his/her life, is constantly subject to a mix of exposures that have an effect on their phenotype but are frequently difficult to identify, especially in an urban environment. Studying how the combination of environmental and socioeconomic factors which the population is exposed to influences pathological outcomes can help transforming public health from a reactive to a predictive system. Thanks to the application of state-of-the-art spatially enabled methods, patients can be stratified according to their characteristics and the geographical context they live in, optimizing healthcare processes and the reducing its costs. Some public health studies focusing specifically on urban areas have been conducted, but they usually consider a coarse spatial subdivision, as a consequence of scarce availability of well-integrated data regarding health and environmental exposure at a sufficient level of granularity to enable meaningful statistical analyses. In this paper, we present an application of highly fine-grained spatial resolution methods to New York City data. We investigated the link between asthma hospitalizations and a combination of air pollution and other environmental and socioeconomic factors. We first performed an explorative analysis using spatial clustering methods that shows that asthma is related to numerous factors whose level of influence varies considerably among neighborhoods. We then performed a Geographically Weighted Regression with different covariates and determined which environmental and socioeconomic factors can predict hospitalizations and how they vary throughout the city. These methods showed to be promising both for visualization and analysis of demographic and epidemiological urban dynamics, that can be used to organize targeted intervention and treatment policies to address the single citizens considering the factors he/she is exposed to. We found a link between asthma and several factors such as PM2.5, age, health insurance coverage, race, poverty, obesity, industrial areas, and recycling.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “This study has been conducted within the PULSE project, funded by the European Commission, briefly presented in this paper.”

For more information on this research see: Spatial Enablement To Support Environmental, Demographic, Socioeconomics, and Health Data Integration and Analysis for Big Cities: a Case Study With Asthma Hospitalizations In New York City. Frontiers in Medicine, 2019;6():. Frontiers in Medicine can be contacted at: Frontiers Media Sa, Avenue Du Tribunal Federal 34, Lausanne, Ch-1015, Switzerland.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting D. Pala, University of Pavia, Dept. of Electronic Computer & Biomedical Engineering, Pavia, Italy. Additional authors for this research include E. Parimbelli, R. Bellazzi, J. Pagan, M.T. Rocca and V. Casella.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2019.00084. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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