Prevalence of asthma in elementary school age children in Iran--a systematic review and meta analysis study.

Asthma is a common chronic disease of childhood which causes considerable morbidity. Asthma affects 1 in 13 school-age children and is a leading cause of office and emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and school absenteeism. Estimating the prevalence of asthma in the community is important in assessing the impact of asthma at the level of population. Since the pooled prevalence of asthma in Iranian elementary school age children (6-12 years old) was not identified, we decide to conduct a meta-analysis study to estimate the prevalence of asthma in elementary school age children in Iran. In order to gather the data, we searched a number of international electronic sources such as Pub Med, Embase, science direct, and ISI for English articles, and Iranian National Knowledge Infrastructure (scientific information) sources such as Iranmedx, Iran-doc, and SID for Persian articles from February 1995 to January 2010 to access the data. We used the words childhood, asthma, prevalence, and Iranian for searching relevant papers and used a data extraction form for the extracted data. The outcome in this Meta analysis study was response to the question, "Ever had asthma", based on the ISSAC program questionnaire. Eleven relevant articles were included for the Meta analysis. The pooled prevalence for girls, boys, and the two genders was obtained as 3.2% (CI; 2.5 to 3.9%), 4.3% (CI; 3.5 to 5.1%) and 3.9% (CI; 3.2 to 4.7%), respectively. The pooled prevalence of asthma in Iranian elementary school age children is low in comparison to the other reports.