Dr Debra Boyer: Childhood Respiratory Illness Impacts Adult Health

Health care needs to do better for children with pediatric respiratory illnesses, especially since their childhood health influences their adult health outcomes says Debra Boyer, MD, pediatric pulmonologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and co-chair of the American Thoracic Society (ATS) International Conference Committee.

Transcript

Can you talk about the impact pediatric respiratory health has on health as an adult?

It's interesting, and there's a lot of stuff we know about this and a lot we don't know about it. It's pretty clear that what happens to you as a child does have an impact on your health as an adult. There's a lot of interesting studies and data that's being presented at this conference, in fact, entire symposia that are being presented that talk about early effects, disease interventions in childhood that then lead to either improvement or worsening of disease in adulthood. Things like [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] COPD, asthma, cystic fibrosis are just some examples of that. So, it's pretty clear that we need to do a better job of health care in pediatrics and in pediatric respiratory disease, because that will have an impact on what happens to you as an adult.