School-aged children with uncontrolled asthma have increased risk for COVID-19 hospital admission, according to a study published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. Ting Shi, PhD, and colleagues conducted a national incident cohort study involving 752,867 children in Scotland aged 5-17 from the linked dataset of Early Pandemic Evaluation and Enhanced Surveillance of COVID-19 (EAVE II) to examine the risk for COVID-19 hospitalization. Overall, 8.4% of those in EAVE II had clinician-diagnosed-and-recorded asthma. Among those with asthma, 6.8% had reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction-confirmed SARSCoV-2 infection, 1.5% of whom were admitted to the hospital with COVID-19. Of the children without asthma, 5.8% had confirmed SARSCoV-2 infection, 0.9% of whom were admitted to the hospital with COVID-19. Compared with those with well-controlled asthma or without asthma, children with poorly controlled asthma had a higher rate of COVID-19 hospital admission. The aHR for those with poorly controlled and well-controlled asthma versus no asthma were 6.40 and 1.36, respectively, using previous hospital admission for asthma as the marker of uncontrolled asthma. The aHRs were 3.38 and 3.53 for those with three or more or two prescribed courses of corticosteroids, respectively, when using oral corticosteroid prescriptions as a marker of uncontrolled asthma.
