Does obesity increase the risk of asthma? : Researchers Reveal the Link Between Being Overweight and Respiratory Disease

Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases in children.

© Nagy Bagoly Ilona / thinkstock

Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases in children. Affected individuals respond to certain triggers such as allergens, infections or chemical stimuli with acute spasm and bronchial constriction. The resulting breathlessness can be life threatening. But how was suffering born? Researchers now know that in addition to genetic predispositions, environmental factors also play a role – for example, car exhaust emissions, but also prenatal influences and the child's diet.

30 percent higher risk

Another potential influencing factor has now been discovered by Jason Lang of Duke University in Durham and his colleagues: body weight. For their study, researchers badyzed data from 507,496 children aged 2 to 17 years. Young patients together had more than 19 million physician visits between 2009 and 2015 – the results of these appointments were entered into a database for research purposes.

The evaluation found that children with weight problems suffered much more often from asthma than children with healthy weights. Thus, obese subjects had a higher disease risk of about 30%. In overweight, but not yet obese children, the risk compared to normal weight was greater by at least 17%. This relationship persisted even after the team had calculated other relevant factors such as age, gender, or allergies.

Many avoidable cases?

According to the researchers, this could mean that obesity plays a vital role in the development of asthma. Is it true? According to them, 10% of all preventable asthma cases in the United States could be avoided, which corresponds to about a million cases. "We can not do anything against many causes, such as genetic predisposition," said Lang. "Obesity and overweight are risk factors that can be avoided, which is further evidence of the importance of an active lifestyle and a healthy weight in the elderly." children. "

As the study authors themselves pointed out, their study is not a controlled clinical trial. The question of whether there is actually a cause-and-effect relationship between obesity and asthma and the mechanisms that cause damage to excess pounds of lung health remains to be demonstrated in further studies. "But I think it would be appropriate to suspect a causal link here," Lang says. (Pediatrics, 2018)