Parental education and lung function of children in the PATY study

Hana Slachtova (1, 2) , Ulrike Gehring (3) , Gerard Hoek (3) , Hana Tomaskova (1) , Heike Luttmann-Gibson (4) , Hanns Moshammer (5) , Anna Paldy (6) , Sam Pattenden (7) , Katarina Slotova (8) , Frank Speizer (4) , Renata Zlotkowska (9) , Joachim Heinrich (10)

1 Center of Health Services
2 Lékařská fakulta / Faculty of Medicine [University of Ostrava]
3 Risk Assessment Sciences Institute
4 Department of Environmental Health
5 Institute of Environmental Health
6 National Institute of Environmental Health
7 LSHTM - London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
8 RAPH - Regional Authority of Public Health [Slovaquia]
9 Institute of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health
10 Institute of Epidemiology

Studies of the relationships between low socio-economic status and impaired lung function were conducted mainly in Western European countries and North America. East-West differences remain unexplored. Associations between parental education and lung function were explored using data on 24,010 school-children from eight cross-sectional studies conducted in North America, Western and Eastern Europe. Parental education was defined as low and high using country-specific classifications. Country-specific estimates of effects of low parental education on volume and flow parameters were obtained using linear and logistic regression, controlling for early life and other individual risk factors. Meta-regressions were used for assessment of heterogeneity between country-specific estimates. The association between low parental education and lung function was not consistent across the countries, but showed a more pronounced inverse gradient in the Western countries. The most consistent decrease associated with low parental education was found for peak expiratory flow (PEF), ranging from −2.80 to −1.14%, with statistically significant associations in five out of eight countries. The mean odds ratio for low PEF (<75% of predicted) was 1.34 (95% CI 1.06-1.70) after all adjustments. Although social gradients were attenuated after adjusting for known risk factors, these risk factors could not completely explain the social gradient in lung function.

Mots clés: Lung function; Parental education; Combined analysis; East-West differences; PATY study; Children

Hana Slachtova, Ulrike Gehring, Gerard Hoek, Hana Tomaskova, Heike Luttmann-Gibson, et al.. Parental education and lung function of children in the PATY study. European Journal of Epidemiology, 2010, 26 (1), pp.45-54. ⟨10.1007/s10654-010-9513-x⟩. ⟨hal-00627929⟩