Epidemiology of asthma and allergic rhinitis in two coastal regions of Saudi Arabia.

In a study of 1953 school children living in two coastal urban areas of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, we used a questionnaire to collect details of age, sex, areas of residence, occupation, education, social class, parental history of asthma and information relating to parental smoking habit. The relative importance of those factors on the likelihood of children having bronchial asthma was assessed using logistic regression and a linear modelling analysis. The extent to which these factors affected the severity of bronchial asthma was also examined. A number of statistically significant associations between bronchial asthma and "breathlessness" (P less than 0.001), "Fathers smoker" (P less than 0.001), "usually cough" (P less than 0.001), "pets" (P less than 0.001), "Family history of allergy" (P less than 0.01), were found.