Fracking and asthma events could be correlated, says study

The results of a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine contains some bad news for asthmatics living in certain areas.

The study found that people with asthma who live near areas of unconventional natural gas development (UNGD) (one part of which is also known as fracking) might be more prone to having asthma attacks due to increased air pollution during these periods.

Researchers looked at approximately 35,500 asthmatic patients treated at the Geisinger Clinic Pennsylvania between 2005 and 2012. The patients examined spanned nearly an entire lifetime’s worth of age ranges, between 5 and 90 years old.

Then they plotted those patients’ “asthma exacerbations” against their residential proximity to fracking and what stage of UNGD was happening in their area the day before they were noted as having breathing issues. The natural gas harvesting stages were classified as “preparation, drilling, stimulation [hydraulic fracturing, or fracking] and production.” The asthma reactions were stratified under mild, moderate or severe headings.

The frequency of UNGD goings-on and clinic interactions due to asthma troubles seemed to be correlated, based on these calculations.

There were more than 6,000 UNGD sites in Pennsylvania at the time of the study. It seemed that the closer a patient lived to a UNGD location, the more likely they were to have had a severe asthma reaction:

“On their index date, patients in the highest group of the spud metric lived a median of 19 km from the closest spudded well compared with 63 km for patients in the lowest group,” the authors said.

Throughout the seven years of the treatment period, the researchers found 5,600 severe, about 3,000 moderate and about 26,000 mild asthma exacerbations, some of which were issues had by the same patients at different times.

These findings could indicate a need for further study of the relationship between natural gas extraction and respiratory conditions, the study’s authors said. If it is true that the link between the two are not just correlational but causational, the information could help inform future policy on fracking and future healthcare treatment plans for asthmatics in an effort to minimize the negative effects on patients. This possible need to reevaluate government and/or medical procedure is especially significant given that almost 26 million people in the U.S., or about 8 percent of the population, have asthma.