Moderate, severe asthma increases risk for ischemic heart disease
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LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Patients with asthma had a greater risk for ischemic heart disease compared with those without asthma, according to a speaker at the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Annual Scientific Meeting.
Further, having moderate or severe persistent asthma significantly increased this risk, according to researchers.
“Symptoms of asthma can be similar to symptoms of ischemic heart disease and might possibly mask an underlying cardiac condition,” study researcher Nicholas Orfan, MD, allergist and immunologist at Family Allergy & Asthma in York, PA, told Healio. “Patients with severe asthma should be carefully questioned about any symptoms of ischemic heart disease and any concomitant risk factors for ischemic heart disease. There should be a low threshold for a cardiac evaluation.”
Orfan and colleagues used January 2017 to June 2020 data from the Colorado All-Payer Claims Database to identify 3,841,761 individuals (54% women), ranging in age from 0 to 65 and older, with the goal of assessing if asthma and ischemic heart disease were related, according to the study abstract.
Researchers evaluated this relationship in asthma as a whole, as well as in mild, moderate and severe persistent asthma subgroups, using logistic regression analysis.
Of the total cohort, 209,351 patients had asthma, and researchers found that these patients had a 1.477 odds (95% CI, 1.42-1.536) for ischemic heart disease when controlling for age and sex, which Orfan told Healio was “a more pronounced difference than we expected.”
Researchers additionally observed that patients with moderate (OR = 1.552; 95% CI, 1.456-1.655) or severe persistent asthma (OR = 2.509; 95% CI, 2.264-2.781) had a significantly increased risk for ischemic heart disease.
However, mild persistent asthma, with an odds ratio of 0.957 (95% CI, 0.906-1.01), did not carry a significantly increased risk for ischemic heart disease, according to the abstract.
“In the future, we will be analyzing prescription data to see if there is an association between corticosteroid therapy, biologic agents or beta agonist exposure and ischemic heart disease,” Orfan told Healio.
For more information:
Nicholas Orfan, MD, can be reached at nao32619@gmail.com.