NHLBI TOPMed: Chicago Initiative to Raise Asthma Health Equity (CHIRAH)

The CHIRAH project was a community-based study of the factors associated with asthma morbidity in the African American population. CHIRAH evaluated the role of various variables (biologic/environmental, psychologic/behavioral, and socioeconomic) on asthma morbidity and the function of changes in these variables on asthma morbidity in a longitudinal fashion. This involved collection of a cohort-based on school screening which was sampled to include similar numbers of underprivileged and non-underprivileged subjects which roughly equally represented self-reported African Americans and self-reported non-African Americans. Subjects were followed up every 3 months of this cohort over the course of 2 years.