Growing up with a lot of green causes less respiratory problems

Children with greenery within a radius of 100 meters around their parental home have fewer respiratory problems than an adult. This is evident from a Scandinavian survey of more than 5,000 people presented today.

As a child is exposed to air pollution, according to the study, an adult more often has asthma, wheezing, and other breathing problems. Up to now, there is still little known scientifically enough about that specific connection.

More than 1 in 10 participants suffered from respiratory problems

Scandinavian researchers, therefore, investigated how respiratory problems were posed in 5415 people aged between 18 and 52 in seven countries, especially in Scandinavia. They looked at how the air quality was set where participants had lived until the age of eighteen.

They also examined how much green there was in a radius of 100 meters around their parental home through satellite images; in more than six hundred participants, “well over one in ten” suffered from at least respiratory complaints, severe wheezing, or ‘late onset’ asthma, which develops in adulthood.

“These are preliminary results,” said Ingrid Nordeide Kuiper of Haukeland University Hospital at the University of Bergen (Norway), “but we found a link between exposure to green during childhood and a lower number of respiratory complaints in adulthood.”