New research finds children who require hospitalization for several common respiratory illnesses tend to live in inner-city neighborhoods with less than optimal socioeconomic conditions, according to Medical Xpress.

“The 20 percent of those most hospitalized with bronchiolitis had a hospitalization rate six times that of the 20 percent least hospitalized,” says Andrew Beck, MD, a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s and the study’s lead author. The 20 percent of those most hospitalized with pneumonia had a hospitalization rate 11 times that of the 20 percent least hospitalized.

“These inequalities were associated with underlying differences in socioeconomic measures and were clustered geographically, with hospitalization hot spots in the inner city and cold spots in outlying suburbs,” says Todd Florin, MD, a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s and co-lead author. “This has substantial clinical and public health implications, suggesting small areas that could be targets for prevention and cost containment.”

The study follows a 2013 Cincinnati Children’s study of asthma hospitalization demonstrating that rates varied 18-fold across local neighborhoods. The neighborhoods in the asthma study often overlapped those in the new JAMA Pediatrics study, which calculated bronchiolitis and pneumonia hospitalization rates for Hamilton County, OH, and for each of 222 census tracts in the county.

Read the full story at www.medicalxpress.com