Heart Disease Risks Higher for All Asthma Patients
Still think our life expectancy is going to increase? Look at the number of children developing asthma and how much those numbers are increasing. No we see that patients with asthma have a 33% increase in likelihood to develop or die from heart disease. Considering that evidence suggests that asthma is an inflammatory condition, and that inflammation has been linked to heart disease, this correlation is no great leap. What this does mean is that we must stop covering up the symptoms in all of today’s chronic diseases and address the underlying biochemical faults.
(American Heart Association’s 41st Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention) Carlos Iribarren, MD, MPH, PhD, of Kaiser Permanente, found that nonsmoking patients with asthma were 33% more likely to develop — or die from — heart disease than nonsmoking patients without asthma. “This means that asthmatic patients and their doctors should be particularly careful,” says Dr. Iribarren, “not only about managing their asthma, but also about managing cardiovascular risk factors such as blood cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar.”Dr. Iribarren’s research was prompted by an interest in the “increasing realization,” as he puts it, “that heart disease is an inflammatory process. Since asthma is an inflammatory disease as well, we were interested in finding out if asthma patients had an increased risk of heart disease.”Earlier studies have indicated an excess cardiovascular mortality among patients with asthma. What is new is that the connection — and the risks — appear to be there even for nonsmokers. There have been prior studies of the link between asthma and heart disease, mostly in Europe, but none of them looked specifically at nonsmokers.”The reason to study nonsmokers is to rule out the strong influence of smoking on both asthma and heart disease,” says Dr. Iribarren. “This is an important question because asthma affects about 6% of the general population, and heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death in the US.”