Health outcome · disease
Airway obstruction
Part of: Obstructive lung disease
Also: Airway Obstructions, Choking, obstructed airway
A narrowing or blockage of the airways that restricts the flow of air in or out of the lungs. It may be sudden or long-standing, partial or complete, and it is the common mechanism behind the obstructive lung diseases rather than a diagnosis in itself.
Not reviewed by a clinician. This entry describes a disease or a symptom. We are introducing clinical review for pages of this kind; until that reviewer is in place, this page has been written and checked by the Coridum team but not reviewed by a clinician. It is general information and not medical advice. How this library is built is described in How we build this library.
Why it matters indoors
Airway obstruction sits below the named diseases in the obstructive lung disease group as the mechanism they share. That makes it useful in studies of buildings: prescriptions for drugs used in obstructive airway disease can be counted across a whole population without anyone having to be examined, which allows exposure to be studied at the scale of a school district rather than a clinic.
What has been measured
In a study of school buildings with moisture damage, primary school students showed some suggestion of an association with new use of drugs for obstructive airway diseases — but with the highest risk in buildings with limited damage rather than in the worst-affected ones (F-0036).
That inversion matters and is not a detail to be smoothed over. If the effect rose with the severity of the damage, it would support a causal reading; that it did not is a reason to treat the finding as a signal to be checked, not as a result.
What to measure
The indoor exposures associated with obstructive symptoms are measurable: dampness and the conditions that sustain it — relative humidity, surface temperature, visible or hidden mould. The obstruction itself is measured by spirometry, by a clinician.
Indoor factors with evidence
| Factor | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mould | not a dose-response: the highest risk was in buildings with limited damage, not the widest | students · school | prospective register-based cohort, 30 418 students in 110 school buildings, multilevel Cox models | F-0036 Pekkanen Inspection confirmed mold damage in schools and new use of d… (2025) | machine |
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | RR 3.54 (1.62–7.71) | schoolchildren aged 9 to 14 · classroom | cross-sectional field study: five public primary schools in an industrialised township and one control school, PM10 and PM2.5 sampled in classrooms and outdoors over 8-hour school days in the dry and wet seasons, 578 pupils examined by questionnaire and spirometry | F-0055 Levels of PM10 and PM2.5 and Respiratory Health Impacts on S… (2020) | machine |
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | OR 5.16 (2.05–14.83) | schoolchildren aged 9 to 14 · classroom | cross-sectional field study: five public primary schools in an industrialised township and one control school, PM10 and PM2.5 sampled in classrooms and outdoors over 8-hour school days in the dry and wet seasons, 578 pupils examined by questionnaire and spirometry | F-0056 Levels of PM10 and PM2.5 and Respiratory Health Impacts on S… (2020) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Identifiers
- MeSH
- D000402
In the literature
- Pekkanen Inspection confirmed mold damage in schools and new use of drugs for airway obstruction: A cohort study (2025). PLoS One. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0333486 CKB 1416
Studies in the Coridum Knowledge Base in which this term is used. The definition follows standard usage in WHO, ISO and textbook sources; it is not quoted from these papers.
CKB = document number in the Coridum Knowledge Base, our curated library of peer-reviewed studies. Follow the DOI for the original paper.
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Airway obstruction. Coridum Knowledge G-0106, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0106/