DISCUSSION
This study suggests that adding weatherization-plus-health
structural interventions to an
existing CHW educational asthma home visit
program results in greater benefits in asthma
control and asthma-related quality of life.
There were also improvements in mold, water
damage, and child exposure to asthma triggers
over and above those found in households
receiving CHW education visits alone.
This study complements the Breathe Easy
Home (BEH) study, which examined the impact
of CHW education and newly constructed
asthma-friendly homes and used the same
historical comparison group. Similar to our study,
the BEH Study found significant improvements
in children’s asthma control, asthmasymptom-free
days, frequency of urgent clinical
care visits, and caretakers’ quality of life43 however, the improvements observed for the
BEH group, although greater than those for the
historical-education-only group, were not significantly
greater. The improvements observed
in our current study were generally greater
than those observed in the BEH study. For
example, the asthma control improvement of
the study group versus comparison group was
approximately 20% in the current study and
5% in the BEH study. Caregivers’ quality of life
improved by 0.7 units in the study group over
that of the comparison group in the current
study, compared with 0.2 units in the BEH
study. Improvements in asthma trigger scores,
however, were greater in the BEH study than
in the current study (score reduction of 0.69 vs
0.5). More research is needed to determine
why asthma outcome improvements observed
for weatherizing existing homes were greater
than those observed for constructing new,
asthma-friendly homes.