Physical Activity and Asthma Symptoms among New York City Head Start Children

The coincidence of both an obesity epidemic and an asthma epidemic among children in the United States has suggested that childhood overweight and sedentary lifestyles may be risk factors for asthma development. We therefore conducted a study of those factors among children enrolled in Head Start Centers located in areas of New York City with high asthma hospitalization rates.

Data were gathered from 547 children through an intensive home visit, and physical activity was measured on 463 children using the Actiwatch accelerometer. Data on allergy and asthma symptoms and demographic variables were obtained from parents' responses to a questionnaire and complete data were available from 433 children.

Overall physical activity was highest in warmer months, among boys, among children whose mothers did not work or attend school, and among children of mothers born in the United States. Activity was also positively associated with the number of rooms in the home. The season in which the activity data were collected modified many of the associations between demographic predictor variables and activity levels. Nearly half the children were above the range considered healthy weight. In cross-sectional analyses, before and after control for demographic correlates of physical activity, asthma symptoms were not associated with physical activity in this age group. Comparing the highest quartile of activity to the lowest, the odds ratio for asthma was 0.91 (95% CI = 0.46, 1.80).

However, the novel associations with physical activity that we have observed may be relevant to the obesity epidemic and useful for planning interventions to increase physical activity among preschool children living in cities in the northern United States.