Does Asthma increase my risk for Covid-19?

No association between asthma and increased risk of hospitalization in patients with COVID-19

Patients with asthma were not more likely to be hospitalized due to COVID-19 compared with patients without asthma, According to new data published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology patients with asthma are not more likely to be hospitalized than patients without asthma. .This outcome is unexpected as asthmatic patients tend have worse outcomes in viral illness which often exacerbates the asthma.

Researchers in conducting a retrospective study across 10 U.S. hospitals in examining the prevalence of asthma and comorbidities in patients with COVID-19 found that there was no significant difference in risk for hospitalization between patients with asthma and those without, after adjusting for other risk factors such as age. Furthermore the risk of hospitalization was also not higher for patients with asthma when their risk factors such as smoking, heart disease, diabetes etc were taken into account.

Importantly, the researchers reported no difference in mortality for patients with coronavirus and with and without asthma.

More studies must be done to look at the underlying immune modulation caused by asthma or asthma treatment to see what impact it may have on COVID-19 outcomes, said Anju T. Peters, MD, MSCI, FAAAI, director of clinical research in the division of allergy/immunology and otolaryngology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine one of authors of the study.