Added Pounds Mean Added Risk for Asthma

Overweight, obese individuals had 50% higher odds for the disease, study found.

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter
Thursday, April 5, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

THURSDAY, April 5 (HealthDay News) -- Overweight and obese individuals are 50 percent more likely to develop asthma than normal-weight men and women, new research suggests.

Public health efforts to control asthma should therefore emphasize the importance of healthy weight management, the researchers argue in the April issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

"The bottom-line is that being overweight appears to significantly increase the risk of asthma," said study co-author Dr. E. Rand Sutherland, of the National Jewish Medical and Research Center (NJMRC) in Denver. "But the caveat is, that until further studies are done, it won't be clear exactly what type or severity of asthma is present in obese people."

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, asthma is an incurable but usually controllable chronic disease involving inflammation and narrowing of the airways that carry oxygen into and out of the lungs.

The disease typically provokes recurrent wheezing, coughing, and a hypersensitivity to allergies and affects approximately 20 million Americans, including 9 million children.

A recent national survey found that about 65 percent of Americans are either obese or overweight, and research has long suggested links between asthma and obesity.

In this study, Sutherland and NJMRC colleague Dr. David A. Beuther pored over prior data on the body mass indices -- measurements of body fat based on the height and weight -- of adult asthma patients.

They looked at data from seven prior studies conducted between 1966 and 2006 in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Together, these studies had looked BMI and asthma in more than 333,000 severely asthmatic patients.

During data review, Sutherland and Beuther adopted standard BMI yardsticks, which define "normal weight" as having a BMI of under 25, "overweight" as a BMI between 25 and 29, and "obese" as a BMI more than 30. For example, a person who is 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 145 pounds has a BMI of 22.