NEW YORK (Reuters Health) -
For people with asthma, those
who are obese are nearly five times more likely than their
non-obese peers to be hospitalized for asthma, new research
indicates.

The findings come from a study of 1113 members of a
healthcare organization who were at least 35 years of age and
had active asthma.

In examining the impact of obesity on asthma outcomes, Dr.
David M. Mosen from Kaiser Permanente in Portland, Oregon, and
colleagues adjusted for a number of factors known to affect
such outcomes, including smoking, oral steroid medication, and
gastric reflux disease.

Compared with normal weight subjects, obese individuals
were 2.7 times more likely to have poor asthma control, and 4.6
times more likely to have a history of asthma-related
hospitalization, Mosen's team reports in the Journal of Allergy
and Clinical Immunology.

The take-home message of this study, said study co-author
Dr. Michael Schatz, from Kaiser Permanente San Diego Medical
Center, in a statement, “is that obese people with asthma need
to be followed more carefully because it's harder to control
their asthma, so they are more likely to end up in the
hospital.”

SOURCE: Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology,
September 2008.