Teen girls in rural areas are more likely to suffer from undiagnosed asthma.
According to a new study conducted at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University, teen girls in rural areas were much more likely than teen boys from the same areas to suffer from undiagnosed asthma. Asthma is equally as common in rural as in urban settings, but the combination of living in a rural area and being female puts teens at a higher risk of their asthma going undiagnosed, according to the study.
Dr. Jeana Bush, an Allergy and Immunology Fellow at the Medical College of Georgia, led the study, which analyzed data on 2,523 adolescents living in Georgia between 2010 and 2013. The researchers found that rural female subjects were much less likely to be correctly diagnosed with asthma than their male counterparts. Dr. Bush believes this may be due to disparities in health care associated with sports participation or the perception that teen girls' health issues are "all in their heads".
"There's a lot of speculation about why females are more likely to be undiagnosed. Maybe it's because boys are more likely to get a sports physical for athletics and they catch it then. Or maybe it's because girls attribute asthma symptoms to something else, like anxiety. That needs further study," she said in a statement.
The study also found that rural, asthmatic girls were much more likely to be depressed than the general population, suggesting a link between depression, asthma and low rates of diagnosis for this group. About 77 percent of the teens in the survey who scored highly on depression rating scales were female.
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