Young girl using asthma inhaler. (Photo by Jeff Overs/BBC News & Current Affairs via Getty Images)
Higher vaccination rates against Covid-19 are associated with protection against children experiencing symptomatic asthma, new study findings show JAMA network opened study. The researchers reported that for every 10 percentage point increase in Covid-19 vaccination coverage, the prevalence of asthma symptoms in children fell by 0.36 percentage points.
“Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases in children in the United States, with approximately 4.7 million children experiencing symptoms each year,” said lead author Matthew M. Davis, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Physician-in-Chief and Chief Scientific officer of Nemours Children’s Health, according to a news release. “Whether asthma is mild or severe, it affects children’s quality of life. So anything we can do to help kids avoid flare-ups is helpful.”
In 2020, healthcare providers and researchers noted that social distancing measures helped prevent children with asthma from being hospitalized or rushed to the emergency department. A year later, in 2021, people had access to Covid-19 vaccines and they were widely administered to children and adults in the United States. Davis and colleagues conducted the study to investigate whether the vaccines could be linked to some form of protection against symptomatic asthma.
“We hypothesized that symptomatic asthma would be positively associated with population-level overall COVID-19 mortality (a proxy for exposure to SARS-CoV-2), and inversely associated with population-level completion of the primary COVID-19 vaccination series 19 and with state mandates for face masks,” they wrote in the paper JAMA study.
The team analyzed state-level data of parent-reported asthma symptoms in their children from the National Survey of Children’s Health. They studied the 2018-2019 data and then compared it to the 2020-2021 data.
They found that the prevalence of asthma symptoms in children at the state level fell from 7.77% in 2018-19 to 6.93% in 2020-21. The only bad news was that the death rate from Covid-19 rose from 80.3 per 100,000 people in 2020 to 99.3 in 2021. “Community-level immunity in states with higher vaccination rates may have helped reduce asthma risk in children,” the authors said. .
In a press release, co-author Lakshmi Halasyamani, Chief Clinical Officer of Endeavor Health in Evanston, Illinois, said: “Continued vaccination against COVID-19 may provide immediate benefits for children with a history of asthma, but this needs to be confirmed with further research. It also raises the question of whether broader COVID-19 vaccination at the population level among children and adults could also help protect children with asthma.”
However, a major limitation of the study is that state-level estimates of Covid-19 vaccination rates among children with a history of asthma were not available. This prevented the researchers from examining differences in asthma symptoms between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. “These findings merit further assessment to determine whether the prevalence of asthma symptoms in children can be reduced by sustained vaccination efforts against SARS-CoV-2,” the authors concluded.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)the prevalence of asthma in children in the United States was 9.5% in 2011. But in 2021, the prevalence dropped to 6.5%. Male children are much more likely to be diagnosed with asthma than female children. The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America reported that while 7% of male children have asthma, 5.4% of female children were diagnosed with the respiratory disease.
