Prevalence of Anemia in Pediatric Patients According to Asthma Control: Propensity Score Analysis

To investigate whether the degree of asthma control is associated with anemia in pediatric patients.

A cross-sectional study was performed using a dataset from the Health Insurance Reviews & Assessment Service (HIRA) of South Korea in 2016, which included children and adolescent patients diagnosed with asthma. Binary logistic regression was used to assess the association between asthma control and the prevalence of anemia.

A total of 236,429 patients under 18 years old were included in the study, including 233,975 patients with controlled and 2454 with uncontrolled asthma. Binary logistic regression after adjustment for confounding factors showed that patients with uncontrolled asthma had a 2.64-fold higher prevalence of anemia than those with well-controlled asthma (OR = 2.64, 95% CI: 2.16-3.22). While there was no effect of gender on the results, there was a statistically significant association between the prevalence of anemia and asthma control in patients under 13 years old.

These findings suggest that the prevalence of anemia is inversely correlated with asthma control in pediatric patients. Further studies are necessary to obtain pathophysiological insight into the relationship between severe inflammatory diseases and anemia.