Purpose: Asthma has been shown to be related to an increased risk of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD), although the results remain inconclusive. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to determine whether asthma increases the risk of IPD. This meta-analysis was performed to validate and strengthen the association between asthma and IPD.
Methods: PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, and the reference lists of all relevant articles and books were screened until May 2019. Two authors independently assessed eligibility and study quality and extracted data. A common odds ratio was estimated using a random-effects meta-analysis model of aggregated published data.
Results: A total of eight studies with 8877 IPD cases and 78,366 controls were included. Our meta-analysis showed that asthma was significantly associated with the increased risk of IPD (OR 2.44 [95% CI, 2.02-2.96]). The children with asthma (0-17 years old) (OR 2.86 [95% CI 1.80-4.55]) had a higher risk of IPD susceptibility compared with the adult patients (≥ 18 years old) (OR 2.45 [95% CI 1.98-3.03]).
Conclusions: Results of this meta-analysis indicated that the patients with asthma had a higher risk of IPD susceptibility, especially among the children with asthma.
Keywords: Asthma; Invasive pneumococcal disease; Meta-analysis.