Anecdotally, I was diagnosed with asthma as a child and walked around with an inhaler for a few years. I liked it, it tasted funny and seemed like a cool gadget at the time. But I did not have asthma. And I'm convinced there's no way my parents would've been diagnosed with it 30 years ago with the minor symptoms I had.

So perhaps the asthma numbers are influenced by an increased willingness to diagnose it. Just a thought.

The guys say that death by asthma (severe cases certainly) are gently falling, but it looks pretty flat to me.

https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/asthma_stats/asthma_underlying_de...

Do you have any intuition for how to identify an increased willingness to over-diagnose? It may be true, but how do we test this hypothesis?

Auto immune diseases as a whole have increased over just the past 30 years; I'd speculate asthma is a part of this.

It will be interesting to see the driving environmental causalities behind these autoimmune disease increases if pollution is not a key variable.

The immune system is a use-it-or-lose-it thing. Lots of healthy bodies mean the immune system has to go after something...

yeah, like in my case... rolls dice....eggs

Is that true? Would frequent vaccines help give the immune system something to do?

Outdoor air quality isn't the only factor in developing asthma