The current study is an attempt to assess the effect of household smoking behavior on asthmatic children 6-12 years old in Mosul City. It also attempts to assess the effect of different epidemiological variable on asthma occurrence including age, gender, residence, family type and size, mother's and father's education, mother's and father's occupation, home conditions, crowding index, medical history of asthmatic cases, family history of allergic diseases, in addition to have an idea about knowledge and believes of parents toward adverse health effects of Environmental Tobacco Smoke(ETS) on their children and measures to protect their children from effect of ETS. It attempts also to assess the effect of household smoking habit on lung function test. Collection of data was carried out for the period between mid of December 2005 and the end of April 2006. A case- control study was conducted in Ibn-Sina Teaching Hospital and AL-Khansa'a Maternity and Pediatric Surgery Hospital, the sample included 304 children; 110 asthmatic cases who were counseling the pediatric outpatient, emergency department and inpatient department, 194 controls who were counseling the pediatric surgery department in the same hospitals. Direct interview of each child with his parent was done using specially designed questionnaire form for this purpose, clinical examination, measurement of height and weight of each child was done, lung function test was performed for each child.
The results showed that 71.8% of the studied asthmatic children were exposed to cigarettes smoke in their home, 12.7% of mother of the studied cases were daily smokers, while 63.6% of fathers were daily smokers, 68.2% were male and 93.6% with urban residence, 79.8% of the fathers were with secondary and higher education, while 56% of mothers were with secondary education. Most of the studied cases (80%) had mild illness, and only 2.7% had severe persistent asthma. 45% of the cases had family history of asthma. Number of attacks/ year was significantly related to ethnicity, crowding index, and birth weight, while severity of disease was significantly related to crowding index. Severity of disease was significantly related to the presence of smoker in the house, home conditions (ventilation and lighting), and number of cigarettes that the child exposed / day.There was a significant difference of lung function test among cases and control; there was no significant effect of the presence of smokers in the house on lung function.The results also showed that was no effect of the number of cigarettes smoked by the mothers on lung function test of the studied cases, while there was a significant association between the number of cigarettes smoked by fathers and lung function test. The results showed that 54.5% of parents believed that exposure to tobacco smoke greatly affect their child's health, and 80% of parents did certain measures to protect their children from ETS, although there were no significant effects of number of measures used by the parents on lung function test. Finally, the current study put forward few recommendations hopefully that the future studies with legislation and education programs will help in improvement of the children health.