Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases in the child population and in Spain it affects 5.7% of children under 14 years of age (around 397,000), who experience symptoms such as persistent cough, wheezing, breathing difficulties, chest tightness or fatigue, among others, which interfere with their daily activities.
These symptoms have been alleviated in many pediatric patients by COVID-19 vaccination, according to a study by researchers at Nemours Children’s Health and Endeavor Health in the United States, which found that states with high COVID-19 vaccination rates saw an improvement in childhood asthma symptoms.
“Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases among children in the United States, with approximately 4.7 million children experiencing symptoms each year,” said senior author Matthew M. Davis, M.D., executive vice president and chief scientific officer of Nemours Children’s Health. “Whether asthma is mild or severe, it impacts children’s quality of life, so anything we can do to help them avoid flare-ups is beneficial.”
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, social distancing and school closures were thought to have contributed to reduced asthma flares in many pediatric patients. Dr. Davis and his co-author, Dr. Lakshmi Halasyamani, chief clinical officer at Endeavor Health in Evanston, Illinois, wondered whether that benefit extended into 2021, as the first COVID vaccines were widely administered to adults and then to children.
Factors that may have influenced the reduction of asthma symptoms
Researchers compared the change in parent-reported childhood asthma symptoms from 2018–2019 to 2020–2021 and combined that data with COVID-19 vaccination rates for people ages 5 and older in 2020–2021, as reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They found that for every 10-percentage-point increase in COVID-19 vaccination coverage, parent-reported asthma symptoms decreased by 0.36 percentage points.
States in the top 25% of COVID-19 vaccination rates had a 1.7 percentage point decrease in asthma symptoms, an impact nearly three times more favorable than states in the bottom 25% of vaccination rates, which saw an average decrease of only 0.6 percentage points in 2020–2021 compared with 2018–2019. These results have been published in JAMA Network.
The co-authors explained that there are several factors that could have contributed to the reduction in asthma symptoms. Community immunity or “herd immunity” in states with higher vaccination rates may have helped reduce children’s risk of contracting COVID-19 and developing asthma complications. Another possibility is that children living in states with higher COVID-19 vaccination rates may have been more likely to receive the vaccines soon after they were approved for their age groups.
With each 10 percentage point increase in COVID-19 vaccination coverage, parent-reported asthma symptoms decreased by 0.36 percentage points
According to the authors, these findings also suggest that COVID-19 vaccines can effectively combat other coronavirus-derived diseases, including the common cold. “Continued COVID-19 vaccination may offer direct benefits for children with a history of asthma, but this needs to be confirmed by further research,” said Dr. Halasyamani. “It also raises the question of whether mass COVID-19 vaccination among children and adults can help protect children with asthma as well.”
The authors noted that one limitation of the study is that they did not measure vaccination rates specifically in children with asthma. Also, while parent-reported data is considered a meaningful measure of patient experience, additional data such as hospital stays or emergency room visits could be used to confirm their findings.
