Prevalence of childhood asthma in China from 2011 to 2018: a Meta-analysis / 中国学校卫生

ABSTRACT

Objective@#To understand the epidemiological characteristic of the prevalence of aasthma in children in China, and to provide clues for the prevention and treatment of asthma in China.@*Methods@#A systematical literature retrieval on children asthma prevalence from CNKI, WanFang Data, VIP and PubMed databases was performed. Random effects model was used to calculate the combined prevalence of asthma and its 95% confidence interval (CI) with Stata 16.0 software, the subgroup analysis was conducted according to sex, age and region.@*Results@#A total of 26 studies were included, including 213 729 children, 112 169 boys and 101 560 girls. Meta-analysis showed that the combined prevalence of asthma in children aged 14 and under in China was 3.3%(95%CI=2.7%-4.0%). The subgroup analysis showed that the prevalence of asthma in boys was higher than that in girls(Q=11.42, P=0.01). The prevalence of asthma in preschool children aged 4-6 was higher than that in infants aged 0-3 and school children aged 7-14(Q=8.03, P=0.02). And there was no significant discrepancy of the asthma prevalence among children between the north and south(Q=0.72, P>0.05).@*Conclusion@#The prevalence of childhood asthma in China presented an increasing trend. Our findings underscore more efforts to control and prevent asthma among children.