Higher Covid-19 vaccination rates are associated with protection against children experiencing symptomatic asthma, according to the findings of a new JAMA Network Open study. The researchers reported that for every increase of 10 percentage points in the coverage of Covid-19 vaccination, the prevalence of pediatric asthma symptoms decreased by 0.36 percentage points.
“Asthma is one of the most common chronic illnesses among children in the United States, with about 4.7 million children experiencing symptoms each year,” lead author Matthew M. Davis, Executive Vice-President, Enterprise Physician-in-Chief and Chief Scientific Officer of Nemours Children’s Health, said in a press 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 beneficial.”
In 2020, healthcare providers and researchers observed 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 across the United States. Davis and colleagues conducted the study to investigate if 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 COVID-19 overall mortality (a proxy for SARS-CoV-2 exposure), and would be inversely associated with population-level completion of the COVID-19 primary vaccination series and with state face mask mandates,” they wrote in the 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 data from 2018-2019 and then compared that to 2020-2021 data.
They found that the state-level prevalence of childhood asthma symptoms decreased from 7.77% in 2018-19 to 6.93% in 2020-21. The only bad news was that the Covid-19-related mortality rate increased 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 children’s asthma risk,” the authors stated.
In a press release, co-author Lakshmi Halasyamani, Chief Clinical Officer of Endeavor Health in Evanston, Illinois, said: “Ongoing vaccination against COVID-19 may offer direct benefits for children with a history of asthma, but this must be confirmed with further research. It also raises the question of whether broader population-level COVID-19 vaccination among children and adults can help protect children with asthma, too.”
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 unavailable. Because of that, the researchers were not able to investigate differences in asthma symptoms among vaccinated and unvaccinated children. “These findings merit further assessment to determine whether childhood asthma symptom prevalence may 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 pediatric asthma in the United States was 9.5% in 2011. But in 2021, the prevalence decreased to 6.5%. Male children are far 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 condition.
