There is "strong evidence" of an association between asthma and complications from a common bacterium known to cause pneumonia, researchers report in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Pneumococcal disease is an infection caused by the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae, also known as pneumococcus.
The most common types of infection caused by this bacterium are ear infection, lung infection (pneumonia), blood stream infection (bacteremia), sinus infection, and meningitis.
Researchers say that people with high-risk asthma are three times as likely to get complications from this infection as those without asthma.
People with low-risk asthma have double the risk of those without asthma, says the study.
Asthma is on the rise in the U.S. and many other developed countries, for reasons health experts don't totally understand.
Between 100 and 150 million people worldwide have asthma, says the World Health Organization (WHO).
The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America estimates that 20 million Americans (one in 15 people) have asthma, with rates rising across all age, sex, and racial groups.
All participants were 2-49 years old and had been participants in Tennessee's Medicaid program for more than a year.
That translates to 4.2 episodes of infection per 10,000 people with high-risk asthma, 2.3 episodes per 10,000 people with low-risk asthma, and 1.2 episodes of infection per 10,000 people without asthma.
The study defined "high-risk asthma" as asthma that required admission to a hospital or emergency department, long-term use of oral steroids used for asthma control, or the dispensing of three or more prescriptions for inhaled drugs called beta-agonists within the year before enrollment in the study.
As asthma rises in the U.S., "discussions about the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of pneumococcal vaccination among persons with asthma will need to be carefully explored," write Talbot and colleagues.