Epidemiology
As of 2009, 300 million people worldwide were affected by asthma leading to approximately 250,000 deaths per year.
It is estimated that asthma has a 7-10% prevalence worldwide. As of 1998, there was a great disparity in the prevalence of asthma across the world, with a trend toward more developed and westernized countries having higher rates of asthma, with as high as a 20 to 60-fold difference. Westernization however does not explain the entire difference in asthma prevalence between countries, and the disparities may also be affected by differences in genetic, social and environmental risk factors. Mortality however is most common in low to middle income countries, while symptoms were most prevalent (as much as 20%) in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Republic of Ireland; they were lowest (as low as 2–3%) in Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Greece, Uzbekistan, India, and Ethiopia.
Asthma affects approximately 7% of the population of the United States and 5% of people in the United Kingdom. Asthma causes 4,210 deaths per year in the United States. In 2005 in the United States asthma affected more than 22 million people including 6 million children. It accounted for nearly 1/2 million hospitalizations that same year. More boys have asthma than girls, but more women have it than men. In England, an estimated 261,400 people were newly diagnosed with asthma in 2005; 5.7 million people had an asthma diagnosis and were prescribed 32.6 million asthma-related prescriptions.
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