How was research for this document conducted? Who participated?
margauxf“Since asthma surveillance data were not available at the census tract level for most of Louisiana, we estimated asthma burden using the inpatient discharge data available through LDH.” (4)
“Case counts are not provided for CTs with a 2018 population of less than 800 to safeguard privacy.” (4)
“To minimize the need for suppression, inpatient discharge data was aggregated for the three most recent years available (2017–2019) and average annual crude rates were calculated for cases where asthma (ICD-10 code J45) was the primary diagnosis, as well as where asthma was any diagnosis.” (4)
“Spearman’s Rank Correlation was utilized to analyze the correlation between various social and environmental vulnerability factors, COVID-19 incidence, and the measures of asthma risk by CT.” (4)
“This was performed by first ranking the values in each dataset using RANK.AVG function in MS Excel 2016, followed by applying the PEARSON function to compare two datasets. Significance was set at alpha less than 0.05 (α < 0.05), with degrees of freedom (df) equal to two less than the total number of data points represented in both datasets” (4)
The research team works for the Section of Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology, Office of Public Health, Louisiana Department of Health in Baton Rouge. Team members included Arundhati Bakshi; Shanon Soileau; Collete Stewart; Kate Friedman; Collete Maser; Alexis Williams; Kathleen Aubin; and Alicia Van Doren.