Impacts of Tobacco Smoke Exposure and Outlier Body Mass Indices on Pediatric Asthma Outcomes

There are seven million children in the United States impacted by asthma [1]. When assessing the severity of a child's asthma, it is important to take into account risk factors known to affect child hood asthma. Two such risk factors that are modifiable include parental tobacco smoke exposure (TSE) and body mass indices (BMI). The main objective of this study was to determine how patients with both TSE and outlier BMIs (>90% or <10%) compared to the whole study population. In particular, three main outcomes were examined: cost of hospitalization, length of stay, and severity of illness. It was determined that TSE and outlier BMI correlated with increased hospitalization length (p=0.05). However, severity of illness (p=0.09) and cost of hospitalization (p=0.1) were not significant. Further studies need to be conducted in order to determine if other pediatric asthma outcomes could change for TSE and outlier BMI patients.