Asthmatic People With Excess Body Fat Make Frequent Trips to Hospitals

Overweight or obese men diagnosed with asthma make frequent trips to the hospitals, a new research has found. The asthmatic people with excess body fat increase their risk of asthma-related hospitalization by nearly five times, compared to those who are thinner, warns the novel study.

The first of its kind study, conducted by David M Mosen of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research at Denver in the US, suggests that obese adult asthmatics are more likely to report poor asthma control, a history of asthma-related hospital admissions, and poor asthma-specific quality of life than non-obese asthmatics.

Researchers at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, Portland, Oregon, and the Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Research, Denver, Colorado, reported their findings in the September issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunologydefine.

Dr Mosen and colleagues reached their findings after studying 1113 members of a healthcare organization who were at least 35 years of age and had persistent asthma.

Besides asthma control and asthma-related hospitalizations, the researchers asked all the study participants about their weight, height, smoking habits, other illnesses, treatment, asthma-specific quality of life as part of the study.

After adjusting for other risk factors like smoking, oral steroid medication, and gastricdefine reflux disease, Dr Mosen’s team found that obese individuals were 2.7 times more likely to have poor asthma control, 4.6 times more likely to have a history of asthma-related hospitalization, and 2.8 more likely to have poor asthma-specific qualify of life.

"The big finding here is that even after adjusting for risk factors, obese adults were nearly 5 times more likely to be hospitalised for their asthma," said Dr Mosen.

"Given that nearly 30% of our country is obese, this study is yet another example of the long-term dangers of obesity, along with heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and dementia."

Obese people with asthma need to be followed more carefully because it's hard to keep their asthma in control, consequently increasing their hospitalization risk, concluded the study co-author Dr. Michael Schatz.

American Obesity Association (AOA) has described the obesity on its Website as a complex, multi-factorial chronic disease involving environmental (social and cultural), genetic, physiologic, metabolic, behavioral and psychological components. It is the second leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

Today, obesity has become a burning issue in many of the countries, mostly the developed ones. It has reached almost epidemic levels in the United States where nearly 127 million adults are overweight, 60 million obese and 9 million severely obese.

As per the estimates of Canadian Cancerdefine Society, nearly one-third of Canadian men are obese. In the United Kingdom, where Obesity is the second biggest cause of death among people, about a fifth of the U.K. population suffers from obesity. A whopping 300 million people around the world are obese.