Children from the rural Conghua region of China had lower rates of asthma and atopic disorders than children from urban Hong Kong, indicating a protective effect from an agricultural lifestyle, according to a study published in Allergy.
These findings could lead to primary preventive strategies for asthma, which affects millions of people worldwide, Yuhan Xing, post-doctoral fellow in the department of pediatrics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Medicine, and colleagues wrote.
The community-based, cross-sectional epidemiological study involved 14,118 children from Conghua (mean