The coronavirus is relatively new and several types of research are being done to understand how complex the disease is. So may studies have been done to understand the severity of COVID-19 on asthma patients and some are still underway. A recently concluded study has found that patients with asthma who get infected with the coronavirus were 70 per cent less likely to die from the disease.
Researchers at a Boston healthcare system found that such people appear to have no need for mechanical breathing assistance or a higher risk of getting hospitalized compared to coronavirus positive person without asthma. Scientists studied around 563 asthma patients with the coronavirus and over 2,500 COVID-19 patients of similar age without asthma.
The two groups admitted to hospitals at a similar rate (18 per cent to 21 per cent) and needed similar mechanical ventilation (3 per cent in asthma patients and 4 per cent with asthma). Researchers found that asthma patients were 70 per cent less likely to die from the virus. None of the 44 people with severe asthma died.
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The study has been published in medRxiv and has not been certified by peer review.
“Although the factors underlying these findings are not yet known, important considerations include – possible biologic mechanisms … and possible protective effects of asthma medications (such as corticosteroids),” the researchers were quoted as saying in the report.
Meanwhile, a recent study found that patients admitted with COVID-19 in the United States and Spain had fewer comorbidities. This is a condition of having more than one disease at the same time. These patients were younger, more likely male, and used lower medication than hospitalized influenza patients.
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The study published by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community included over 34,000 coronavirus positive patients across three continents. The study was intended to give a more detailed picture of the characteristics of people tested with COVID-19. This would make help in decision making with regards to hospitalized patients.
The study named “Deep phenotyping of 34,128 adult patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in an international network study” was published in the Nature Communications.