Association of physical activity, asthma, and allergies: A cohort of farming and nonfarming children

摘要

The lower prevalence of asthma and hay fever among farm children has been attributed to microbial exposures,1 but it might also be related to differential physical activity (PA) behavior. One might speculate that farmers' children spend more time outdoors and thus accumulate higher levels of PA, but until now no data are available to confirm this hypothesis. Studies testing associations between PA and asthma and hay fever, respectively, are contradictory. In part, the conflicting evidence might be due to methodo-logic constraints because several studies based the assessment of childhood PA on questionnaires that have been shown to be of poor validity5; in addition, most of them were cross-sectional in design.The present analysis aimed at addressing this open question. The analysis was based on a follow-up of 352 children (7-10 years) from the Swiss sample of the large European GABRIEL study that was originally designed to systematically study farming and rural environments and their impact on childhood asthma and atopic disease.