Respiratory illness in children: do deprived children have worse coughs?

Parents of a stratified random sample of 234 children from 21 general practices in North East England were interviewed at home. All these children had been reported in a postal questionnaire as having had a cough between six and ten weeks before the interview. Interviews covered social characteristics of the family, the severity of the child's cough and the reactions of the parents to hypothetical sets of symptoms. The parents of children in materially deprived circumstances appeared to report worse coughs than other parents. We confirmed this finding by constructing a scale of perceived cough severity. However, we found no evidence that the inequality was due to exaggeration of the severity of the cough by materially deprived parents. Our conclusion that materially deprived children suffer worse respiratory illness is the more important because previous evidence suggests that the after-effects persist into adulthood.