{"doi":"10.1017/dmp.2021.143","title":"Asthma-Related Emergency Department Visits in North Carolina Following Hurricane Irene","abstract":"OBJECTIVE: Previous research suggests that people with asthma may experience a worsening of symptoms following hurricanes due to changes in environmental exposures, discontinuity in chronic disease management, and stress. The objective of this study was to estimate changes in asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits in North Carolina following Hurricane Irene, which made landfall in August 2011. METHODS: Changes in asthma-related ED visits in September to December of 2010 and 2011 were examined using data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project State Emergency Department and Inpatient Databases. A Poisson generalized linear model was used to estimate the association between Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster declarations following Hurricane Irene and county-level asthma-related ED visits controlling for month, year, and county. RESULTS: Following Hurricane Irene, disaster declarations were made for 38 of 100 counties in North Carolina. In September 2010, the rate of asthma-related ED visits for North Carolina was 6 per 10,000 person-months. In September 2011, rates of asthma-related ED visits were similar in counties with and without disaster declarations (7 and 5 per 10,000 person-months, respectively). When adjusting for covariates, there was little or no difference in the rate of asthma ED visits before and after the hurricane between counties with and without a disaster declaration (rate ratio {RR} [95% confidence interval {CI}] = 1.02[0.97, 1.08]). CONCLUSIONS: Although risk factors for asthma exacerbations increase following hurricanes, these results found little evidence of an increase in asthma-related ED visits in North Carolina following Hurricane Irene.","journal":"Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness","year":2021,"id":182767,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":14,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.8701,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":452736,"name":"Audrey F. Pennington","orcid":"0000-0002-6233-6269","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":452735,"name":"Kanta Sircar","orcid":"0000-0003-2819-2035","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":78319,"name":"W. Dana Flanders","orcid":"0000-0003-4069-3262","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":735252,"name":"Kristen N. Cowan","orcid":"0000-0001-6912-4755","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":4,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:48:13.605421Z","pmid":"34165061","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}