On a worldwide basis, the climate is fast changing: average temperatures and extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, and aridity are increasing. To formulate a hypothesis on the possible relationship between arid climate and incidence of asthma in Italy is a team of the National Research Council, which brings together researchers from the Institute of Environmental Geology and Geoengineering (Cnr-Igag), Institute of Translational Pharmacology (Cnr-Ift) and Institute of Clinical Physiology (CNR-IFC), in collaboration with pneumologists, biostatistics and epidemiologists of several Italian universities (Verona, Ancona, Ferrara, Palermo, Pavia, Turin and Sassari). The findings were reported in the journal Scientific Reports. The researchers examined periodic changes between 1957 and 2006 to see if there was a relationship between drought, climate change, and the prevalence of asthma. "In Italy, drought variations reconstructed using the Palmer index (sc-PDSI) - which measures the severity of the drought - have been linked to fluctuations in a climate index, the Summer North Atlantic Oscillation (S-NAO), which, in its negative phase, generates humid conditions over northwestern Europe and arid conditions over the central Mediterranean. It was discovered that the incidence of asthma in our country follows the same pattern of fluctuations, with an average periodicity of 6 years," explains Sergio Bonomo, researcher at CNR-Igag and study author.
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