Replacing gas stove can help asthmatics as much as some drugs, US experts find

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
A US study has found a 70% drop in hospital admissions and days off from work or school when people with poorly controlled asthma had their gas stove and hob replaced with electric.

Ohio’s publicly owned MetroHealth began the study in December 2024 but funding was terminated early by the incoming Trump administration. It had been designed to investigate if replacing gas cooking improved asthma for 1,200 people living near Cleveland, Ohio.


Prof Ash Sehgal of Case Western Reserve University, the project’s leader, said: “We had completed the project at fewer than 100 households. As a result, over 1,100 households were unable to benefit. We also had to lay off about 20 project staff.”

The team finished the stove replacements that were under way and closed the project, but to the researchers’ surprise, the benefits could be clearly detected even in the scaled-down study of 72 homes.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”




Each person was assessed for four weeks before the gas cooking replacement, and for four weeks afterwards, including scoring their asthma using an internationally recognised scale of zero to six.
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This is what a coherent application of a competent biopsychosocial model would look like, where the linear passage of time and plausible causality are respected. There are layers of psychological excuses why some people prefer gas stoves, and there are social policies in place that make them the only option for a lot of people.

It's also not surprising to see this program was barely able to fund itself. Had they decided to instead do some breathing meditation exercises, they could have funded themselves for many years. Medicine works well when it respects the physical nature of how life exists and thrives.
 
I have an air quality sensor in the living room and bedroom that measures VOCs, CO2 and Particulate Matter 2.5. All rise drastically when the gas stove is on even just boiling water, up to 100x their baseline levels (and about +300ppm for CO2). Normally outside is worse than indoors for PM2.5 and VOCs, presumably the HEPA filters are doing a decent job at keeping the particles down very low but the CO2 is consistently a problem when the windows are closed and VOCs/PM2.5 when they are open! That gas stove however produces insane levels in the entire house just boiling some rice.
 
Spartacus said:
Very interesting. My asthma cleared up when I switched to an all electric cooker. I never made the correlation with my asthma!
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As a sort of side note

I didn’t realise until recently that certain electric hobs can be purchased that have timers and auto-off.

Which is another boon for issues where you might feel up to it when putting something on the stove but risk fall asleep or have lost function by the time it comes to stopping it. Like you can have for an oven.

Albeit it doesn’t solve all issues like pans boiling over or needing to be stirred etc it doesn’t solve start to change the balance now that some electric stoves (with the right pans) now work quickly / have significant heat compared to that used to be one of the perceived downsides vs gas

The one about ‘if electric had a power cut’ is quite hard to do much about I guess.

But it’s useful to know as it is indeed not much talked about in facts of what actually is released by non-partisan articles or individuals that don’t feel like someone is keen to sell something for the various reasons (green/eco personal or selling the equipment)
 
InitialConditions said:
Yes, this is one of those public health topics that remains under-the-radar despite growing evidence that it is somewhat harmful to everyone, not just those with asthma.
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It's mostly covered up, as there are too many implications about air pollution in general, and all the solutions affect wealthy people in ways that no government has the courage to take on. The health harms from pollution greatly exceed those attributed to 'stress' and all the other vague psychovehavioral junk, but they are socioeconomic problems that involve socioeconomic solutions, and that goes against the main fashion of privatizing all responsibility to the individual, especially the most vulnerable.

So much easier to blame everything on vague vibes and making it everyone's fault, this way it's no one's responsibility.
 
bobbler said:
The one about ‘if electric had a power cut’ is quite hard to do much about I guess.
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Nowadays we have quite good batteries that can put out KWs that can run a household. Solar systems often come with them to maximise usage but you can also get inverter battery combos you can charge cheaper overnight and plug whatever you want into them. They pay for themselves in a few years if you can use the power everyday. Having backup power in each house via batteries is becoming more common and the price is dropping every year.
 
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