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Asthma may not be a risk factor for severe COVID-19

Published: August 5, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly across communities worldwide and has killed hundreds of thousands of people. The major symptoms associated with COVID-19 are related to the respiratory system; therefore, researchers have wondered if having respiratory diseases like asthma puts people at higher risk for severe disease and death from COVID-19. New York City (NYC) was an epicenter of COVID-19 early in the pandemic and had high rates of asthma even prior to the pandemic, making it an ideal place to study the relationship between severe COVID-19 and asthma.

Researchers at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center recently published findings from their study in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI). Dr. Lovinsky-Desir and colleagues used electronic health records data from three different hospitals within their network in NYC to look at patients hospitalized with COVID-19 during the Spring. Their study addressed the specific question: does having a diagnosis of asthma put a patient who is hospitalized with COVID-19 at higher risk for severe outcomes such as requiring a breathing tube or death?  
The researchers compared hospitalized patients who had a diagnosis of asthma before COVID-19 to those who did not have asthma. They excluded any patients who had chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD) and patients who were older than 65 years of age.

24% of patients who had asthma before being admitted for COVID-19 were younger than 21 years of age and 13% of patients were between the ages of 22-65 years. Having a diagnosis of asthma did not make patients more likely to require a breathing tube, stay in the hospital longer, or die from COVID-19. Even when the researchers accounted for patients who had other high-risk conditions such as obesity, hypertension, hyperlipidemia or diabetes, there was no difference in death between patients with versus without asthma. In fact, no patient with asthma younger than 40 years of age died in this study.

Among hospitalized patients 65 years and younger with severe COVID-19, asthma was not associated with worse outcomes, regardless of age, obesity, or other high-risk diseases. This information is important in determining the prognosis for hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19.

The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI) is an official scientific journal of the AAAAI, and is the most-cited journal in the field of allergy and clinical immunology.

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