Asthma is a chronic health condition that affects millions of Americans annually. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2021b), currently, nearly 25 million people are struggling with asthma nationwide, constituting almost 8% of the US population. For this reason, the topic of interest for the present research is asthma and its existing implications on the human population. Asthma stands for a chronic lung disease that causes airways to narrow due to swelling and complicates one’s ability to breathe. In most situations, asthma manifests through attacks characterized by a sudden shortness of breath and chest pain. While sometimes, the causes of the attack are unclear, many people struggling with asthma are exposed to an attack after being faced with a trigger such as a specific allergen, cold air, pollutant, or exercise (CDC, 2021a). Thus, the series of unresolved questions behind the topic of asthma continue to spark interest in the medical community.
The issue, however, has become especially relevant in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of the variants of the SARS-CoV-2 take a serious toll on people’s lung capacity, resulting in the inability to breathe autonomously. Hence, while many people became exposed to the risk of respiration complications, the problem was even more serious for the ones already manifesting difficulties with the airway and breathing. Indeed, the hypotheses claim that having chronic diseases in general, let alone asthma, affects one’s chances of successful recovery from COVID-19. To understand the exact impact COVID-19 has on people living with asthma, the annotated bibliography below will address the articles presenting evidence on the matter.
The article by Choi et al. (2020) seeks to discover the effect of asthma on patient outcomes among people diagnosed with COVID-19. In this quantitative study, the results demonstrated that both medical costs and the mortality rate among COVID-diagnosed patients were significantly higher among the population with underlying asthma. The strength of this research is the number of participants involved in the empirical study, as nearly 7,500 COVID-19 patients were examined (Choi et al., 2020). Moreover, this article also has the benefit of justifying the hypothesis that while asthma patients are at higher risk of poop COVID-19 outcomes, the disease itself was not an independent factor. The limitation of the study concerns its rather limited population of asthma-diagnosed patients, as the sample is unlikely to produce generalizable results. In general, this article is extremely beneficial in terms of understanding the nature of the correlation between COVID-19 and asthma.
Contrary to the previous research, the study by Liu et al. (2021) presents results that demonstrate little or no correlation with the prevalence of COVID-19. Thus, according to the researchers, the analyzed studies demonstrate that people with asthma not only had no COVID-related complications but were systematically at a lower risk of death from COVID-19. The evident strengths of this research include an extensive number of articles used for review and the systematization of COVID-19 cases according to their severity. However, a significant limitation of the study is the absence of an explanation of why people with asthma were at a lower risk of dying from COVID-19. While it is likely that such results were caused by the prevalence of other chronic conditions in the non-asthma group, the conclusions from this research could be speculated by others. In summary, this article provides extensive research on the topic of COVID-19 risks in people with asthma.
The study by Terry et al. (2021) presents a systematic review of the topic of the correlation between asthma and COVID-19 hospitalization and diagnosis. While the study does not give a definitive answer to the research question, it states that there is no distinct correlation between asthma and COVID-19 severity. The strengths of this research include the extensive number of studies used for the analysis and the specification of the geographical prevalence of the asthma-COVID correlation. The limitation, however, concerns the limited study samples in the research analyzed. Overall, this article presents a series of meaningful insights into asthma patients at risk of being diagnosed with coronavirus.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021a). Asthma. Web.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021b). Most recent national asthma data. Web.
Choi, Y. J., Park, J. Y., Lee, H. S., Suh, J., Song, J. Y., Byun, M. K., Cho, J. H., Kim, H. J., Kim, J.-H., Park, J.-W., & Park, H. J. (2021). Effect of asthma and asthma medication on the prognosis of patients with COVID-19. European Respiratory Journal, 57(3). Web.
Liu, S., Cao, Y., Du, T., & Zhi, Y. (2021). Prevalence of comorbid asthma and related outcomes in COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice, 9(2), 693-701. Web.
Terry, P. D., Heidel, R. E., & Dhand, R. (2021). Asthma in adult patients with COVID-19. Prevalence and risk of severe disease. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 203(7), 893-905. Web.