Excess Weight Estimated to Cause More Than 250,000 New Asthma Cases Each Year in U.S.

Being overweight or obese increases the odds of developing asthma in the next year according to an analysis by National Jewish pulmonologists E. Rand Sutherland, M.D. and David Beuther, MD

It has been known for some time that asthma patients are more likely than healthy individuals to be overweight. But it has been unclear whether having asthma causes people to become overweight or whether being overweight causes people to develop asthma. Drs. Sutherland and Beuther looked at large prospective studies that followed people who originally did not have asthma but developed it in subsequent years. They selected seven such studies with more than 330,000 subjects.

When they crunched the numbers they found that people with a body mass index greater than 25 (5’4”/145 pounds, 5’10”/174 pounds, 6’0”/184 pounds) had about a 50 percent greater chance of developing asthma in the next year than those with a BMI less than 25. The researchers also found that the more overweight a person is, the greater the risk of developing asthma. The researchers calculated that excess weight accounts for about 250,000 new asthma cases per year.

“Even small reductions in the average BMI of people in the United States could translate into significant decreases in the number of new cases of asthma each year,” said Dr. Beuther.