Decrease in new-onset asthma during the COVID-19 pandemic

초록

Background: Asthma is a common chronic respiratory diseaseworldwide. During the COVID-19 pandemic, measures to re-duce virus transmission coincided with reduced asthma exac-erbations. This study investigates whether these measures alsoaffected the development of new-onset asthma.Method: Data from the Korea National Health InsuranceService (NHIS) were analyzed. Asthma was defined as hav-ing at least two prescriptions for asthma-related medicationswithin one year of the initial diagnosis under the InternationalClassification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10) codes J45–J46. New-onset asthma was identified as cases diagnosed be-tween 2011 and 2022, with no prior records of asthma diagnosisor treatment between 2002 and 2010. An autoregressive inte-grated moving average (ARIMA) model was applied to assessthe incidence of new-onset asthma during the pandemic.Results: A total of 4,795,366 adults were diagnosed with new-onset asthma between January 2011 and December 2022.Seasonal trends revealed peaks in incidence during winter, witha notable reduction in the magnitude of both peaks and troughsduring the pandemic years (2020 and 2021). ARIMA analysisindicated a 41% lower-than-expected incidence during the pan-demic (incidence ratio: 0.592; 95% CI: 0.426–0.800; p < 0.001).From March 2022, incidence rates began to rise, culminating ina 1.5-fold higher incidence in 2022 compared to 2020 or 2021.Conclusion: The incidence of new-onset asthma significantlydecreased during the pandemic, likely due to public health in-terventions. However, a resurgence following the relaxationof these measures highlights their potential role in mitigatingasthma development. This research was supported by a grantfrom the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (No.2021- 05- 008).Conflicts of Interest: The authors did not specify any links ofinterest.