Asthma and COVID-19: a systematic review

BackgroundSevere coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) presents with progressive dyspnea, which results from acute lung inflammatory edema leading to hypoxia. As with other infectious diseases that affect the respiratory tract, asthma has been cited as a potential risk factor for severe COVID-19. However, conflicting results have been published over the last few months and the putative association between these two diseases is still unproven.MethodsHere, we systematically reviewed all reports on COVID-19 published since its emergence in December 2019 to June 30, 2020, looking into the description of asthma as a premorbid condition, which could indicate its potential involvement in disease progression.ResultsWe found 372 articles describing the underlying diseases of 161,271 patients diagnosed with COVID-19. Asthma was reported as a premorbid condition in only 2623 patients accounting for 1.6% of all patients.ConclusionsAs the global prevalence of asthma is 4.4%, we conclude that either asthma is not a premorbid condition that contributes to the development of COVID-19 or clinicians and researchers are not accurately describing the premorbidities in COVID-19 patients.

Automated summary

A systematic review of all reports on COVID-19 published between December 2019 and June 30, 2020 found conflicting results regarding the potential association between asthma and severe COVID-19. Only 1.6% of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 were reported to have asthma as a premorbid condition, suggesting that asthma may not be a significant contributing factor to the development of COVID-19.