Prévalence et facteur de risque d’asthme chez les enfants moins de 15 ans dans la ville de Mahajanga Madagascar

Abstract

Introduction: Asthma is a disease that causes many difficulties in school-aged children including decreased academic performance. Its prevalence is increasing throughout the world. The objective of our study was to determine the prevalence of asthma in children aged 3 to 15 years in the city of Mahajanga. Methods: It is a prospective transversal study during 2 months (from May to July 2013), carried out in three private and public school in the city of Mahajanga. We used the written questionnaire of the ISAAC study translated into Malagasy for our study. Results: We handed out 1800 questionnaires with a return of 1500 responses. The participation rate was 83.33%. The prevalence of asthma was 5.6% with a sex ratio of 1.21 (7.12% in boys versus 4.45% in girls). Theprevalence of allergic rhinitis and allergic conjunctivitis was 3.86% and 2.26%, respectively. Concerning symptoms suggestive of asthma or equivalent of asthma, 7.9% of the children questioned had wheezing during their life; 3.8% had whistling during the last 12 months; 3.2% had whistling during or after exertion in the last 12 months; 10.5% had dry cough at night in the last 12 months in the absence of colds or other respiratory infections. The following factors were identified as factors associated with asthma: gender (p = 0.025, OR: 0.6), history of asthma (p <0.0001, OR: 18.9) and allergy in the family (P <0.0001, OR: 5.48), presence of hay fever (p <0.0001, OR: 18.2), allergic rhinitis (P <0.0001, OR: 12.78) and allergic conjunctivitis (P <0.0001, OR: 11.5) in children. The following were not a risk factor for asthma: the presence of cat or dog at home, presence of smoker in the house. Conclusion: Mahajanga is among the areas with an average prevalence of asthma. A large-scale study including more school children in rural and urban areas of the 6 provinces of Madagascar is needed to further investigate this prevalence.