So I wanted to kind of give a sanity check to some of these results myself. A common problem with this kind of analysis is just that populated areas often have better healthcare than rural areas, and so it can be argued that things like asthma are diagnosed with a higher incidence in cities where air quality is also worse. In this case I chose to look at asthma deaths per capita in the UK between 2011 and 2015 rather than diagnoses. The theory being if healthcare was better less people would be dying, but also that it's hard to argue someone who dies from something didn't have it or that there are more people dying from it who just haven't come forward yet. My approach wasn't rigorous by any measure. I used the 2011-2015 data since it was the most readily available and digestible from from the Office for National Statistics. My population data was from the Population Estimates for Clinical Commissioning Groups datasets also from ONS.

I just took the two excel tables and essentially matched the CCG names together. If I couldn't find a match (one was a data set of the UK and Wales the other was just the UK) I just threw out that particular CCG. There are some holes in the data but I didn't want to spend ages doing it by hand. In general it seems like the asthma deaths are in agreement with their findings. The more urban an area it seems the higher the rate of asthma deaths per capita. I know this is to be expected in a sense, but I thought I'd share since I went through the trouble.