Using household cleaning sprays and air fresheners as little as once a week can raise the risk of developing asthma in adults, researchers found. Such products have been associated with increased asthma rates in cleaning professionals, but a similar effect in non-professional users has never before been shown.
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“Frequent use of household cleaning sprays may be an important risk factor for adult asthma,” wrote lead author Jan-Paul Zock, Ph.D., of the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology at the Municipal Institute of Medical Research in Barcelona, Spain.
The epidemiological study, the first to investigate the effects of cleaning products on occasional users rather than occupational users, appeared in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Women do most of the cleaning
The study included more than 3 500 subjects from 10 European countries, and subjects were assessed for current asthma, current wheeze, physician-diagnosed asthma and allergy at follow-up, which took place an average of nine years after their first assessment. They were also asked to report the number of times per week they used cleaning products.
Two-thirds of the study population who reported doing the bulk of cleaning were women, about 6 percent of whom had asthma at the time of follow-up. Fewer than 10 percent of them were full-time homemakers.
The risk of developing asthma increased with frequency of cleaning and number of different sprays used, but on average was about 30 to 50 percent higher in people regularly exposed to cleaning sprays than in others. The researchers found that cleaning sprays, especially air fresheners, furniture cleaners and glass-cleaners, had a particularly strong effect.
Definite asthma risk
“Our findings are consistent with occupational epidemiological studies in which increased asthma risk was related to professional use of sprays among both domestic and non-domestic cleaning women,” wrote Zock. “This indicates a relevant contribution of spray use to the burden of asthma in adults who do the cleaning in their homes.”
The design of the study was not intended to determine the biological mechanism behind the increase in asthma with exposure to cleaning sprays, but Zock and colleagues propose a number of hypotheses, including the possibility that asthma is partially irritant-induced, that sprays contain sensitisers that are specific to asthma, and that an inflammatory response is involved in asthma development. “There is a need for researchers to conduct further studies to elucidate both the extent and mechanism of the respiratory toxicity associated with such products,” noted Zock. – (EurekAlert!)
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