Preventing Deaths from Asthma

Death from asthma is rare. In 1988 only 4580 U.S. death certificates listed asthma as the primary cause of death. Why then is so much attention being paid to this topic in the medical and lay literature? The answer lies not in the absolute number of deaths, but in the fact that the rate of death from asthma has increased steadily in the United States and many other countries since the late 1970s.¹–⁴ Although some of the increase appears to have resulted from changes in the way deaths from asthma are coded by physicians and nosologists, much of the…