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December 28, 2007, 7:34 AM CT

Handling pesticides associated with asthma

New research on farm women has shown that contact with some usually used pesticides in farm work may increase their risk of allergic asthma.

Farm women are an understudied occupational group, said Jane Hoppin, Sc.D., of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and lead author of the study. More than half the women in our study applied pesticides, but there is very little known about the risks.

The study was reported in the first issue for January of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society.

The scientists assessed pesticide and other occupational exposures as risk factors for adult-onset asthma in more than 25,000 farmwomen in North Carolina and Iowa. They used self-reports of doctor-diagnosed adult asthma, and divided the women into groups of allergic (atopic) or non-allergic (non-atopic) asthma based on a history of eczema and/or hay fever.

They found an average increase of 50 percent in the prevalence of allergic asthma in all farm women who applied or mixed pesticides. Remarkably, eventhough the association with pesticides was higher among women who grew up on farms, these women still had a lower overall risk of having allergic asthma in comparison to than those who did not grow up on farms, due to a protective effect that remains poorly understood.........