Trends in prevalence of asthma and COVID-19 pandemic-related factors in South Korea: a post-hoc analysis

Abstract

Objective: There are only a few studies investigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the prevalence of asthma, especially between different age groups. Thus, we aimed to examine the trends of age-stratified asthma prevalence in South Koreans before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.Methods: This study utilized data derived from the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) between 1998 and 2021. The objective of our study was to investigate the annual change associated with asthma, over a period of 24 years from 1998 to 2021.Results: From 1998-2021, a total of 206,687 subjects participated in the KNHANES surveys. Asthma prevalence in Korean increased in the pre-pandemic era (from 1.61% to 2.92% from 1998 to 2019) but decreased significantly during the pandemic (from 2.83% to 2.97% from 2020 to 2021). Overall, only changes in asthma prevalence in school age children and adults (19-39 years) decreased after including data from years during the COVID-19 pandemic (from 0.12% [95% CI, 0.08 to 0.15] to 0.09% [95% CI, 0.02 to 0.16] and from 0.13% [95% CI, 0.10 to 0.16] to 0.11% [95% CI, 0.07 to 0.16], respectively). Conclusions:In this study of asthma prevalence in the age-stratified Korean population, both asthma prevalence trends and annual percent changes differed amongst the different age groups before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Asthma prevalence decreased for preschool and school-aged children, while no clear trends were observed in adults. These results help improve our understanding of asthma prevalence trends in different generations of the Korean population and highlight the need for further investigation of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.